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Pre-set modes like “Sports” and “Night Portrait” make it easy for us to just point and shoot. If you’re new to photography, two of the most important things to learn are aperture and shutter speed settings as these will give you a lot of creative control. If you’re wondering which cameras have these settings, some digital compacts have them while most of the bridge (prosumer) cameras do and all SLRs have them.

At first it seems a little daunting to start using manual camera settings, but the vast improvement in your pictures will be worth the effort.

Photography 101 – Introducing Aperture

The aperture of a camera works a lot like how the iris of a person’s eye works. Similar to your irises and how they widen or narrow to let in more or less light through the pupils, the camera’s lens diaphragm narrows or widens to let in less or more light in through the lens. The aperture is the size of this opening.

Aperture allows you to increase or decrease the amount of light that reaches the sensor and therefore helps determine how dark or light the picture will be.

The camera aperture also controls the image’s depth of field.

To better understand how this works, make a fist with your hand and hold it in front of your eye. Then gradually open your fist. Notice when the opening in your hand is small everything you see is in focus? But when your fist is open wide, the object closest to you is sharper than the background?

A small aperture is great for taking pictures like landscapes where you want everything in focus.

When you use your camera’s Aperture Priority setting you can set the aperture to whatever f-stop number you want. These numbers represent ratios, and the larger the f-stop number, the narrower the aperture. So the larger the f-stop number on your camera, the larger the depth of field.

The reason the setting is called “priority” is that when you set the aperture, the camera adjusts the shutter speed so that the exposure is just right. In other words, in the wider scheme of exposure, the aperture setting will have priority, while shutter speed plays a supporting role.

Photography 101 – Introducing Shutter Speed

While the aperture controls how much light at one time falls on the image sensor, the shutter speed controls the length of time the camera allows in the light.

You may have noticed how people in pictures taken in the 19th century rarely are smiling. Shutter speeds were so slow back then that people had to hold perfectly still for several minutes – not to mention in all those stiff clothes they wore for picture day. No wonder they had such a serious look!

The most common shutter speeds today are 1/500th of a second to 1/60th of a second. By using Shutter Priority, you can then choose the shutter speed (within your camera’s range) for the exact effect you want.

If you use a shutter speed slower than 1/60, you should use a tripod or some type of camera stabilizer because when the shutter is open that long, even the slightest jiggle can create fuzzy pictures.

To freeze action, set the camera’s Shutter Priority to a fast speed, which is what Sports mode does. You can be a lot more selective with this manual type of setting. For example, a dog sitting quietly will require a shutter speed of around 1/125 in order to freeze the small twitch in the dog’s tail. On the flip side, taking pictures at a soccer game may require up to 1/500 to freeze fast moving actions.

Using manual settings like Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority give you more creative control, which means better pictures that you can display on your wall.

Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames and loves taking pictures. If you can’t find the frame you want, check out Your Picture Frames website and see their selection of unusual photo frames in all sizes.