Basic Techniques | Shutter Speed and Aperture

Throughout today's post I am going to describe the different effects you can create within photographs by choosing different aperture and shutter speed settings in your camera. 

Shutter Speed

The speed of the shutter controls how long the shutters open for resulting in how much light passes through onto the image sensor within your camera.

Fast Shutter Speeds:

Shutter Speed 1/500
Ⓒ2014HannahBennett

A fast shutter speed is used to freeze the movement of subjects that are travelling quite quickly, this could be a fast running athlete, a bird fluttering it's wings, anything moving at a fast pace within the frame. The image above is an example which demonstrates the use of a very quick shutter speed. It's a shot of a sports car which was taken whilst it was speeding around the track. To freeze the movement of the car and ensure it appeared sharp within the shot a shutter speed of 1/500 was used.

Slow Shutter Speeds:

Shutter Speed = 1 
©2014HannahBennett

A slow shutter speed is used to create the opposite effect so that you can capture the movement of your subject. This image above demonstrates this as it was taken over a 1 second long exposure to capture the full movement of the firework.

Aperture

Source

The aperture, controlled by a device inside your lens known as a diaphragm, also controls the amount of light passing through onto the sensor but more importantly controls the range of focus across the image as well. The size of the aperture is referred to as an 'f-number', your camera will have a number of different f-stops. As demonstrated in the picture above, a low number aperture, such as f/1.4 will increase the size of the diaphragm, resulting in a very shallow depth of field, and a high number aperture, such as f/8 will descrease the size of the diaphragm and result in a very deep depth of field.

Shallow Depth of Field:

Aperture = f/2.8
©2014HannahBennett

As you can see above, this photograph demonstrates the use of a low number f stop, resulting in a very large amount of the background being blurred, which is referred to as a shallow depth of field.

Deep Depth of Field:

Aperture = f/32
©2014HannahBennett

However, this image above, display the opposite, the use of a high number f stop, which has resulted in very little blurring of the background, keeping most of the frame within focus. As you can see, the petals in the background are relatively clear, you can see the natural lines running through the petals, this detail hasn't been lost as a result of any blurring. 

You can create many different effects in your images by experimenting with different shutter speed and aperture combinations, the easiest way to find out what works best is by having a mess around with your own cameras until you've got the hang of it.

Thanks for reading!