Shutter Speed and Aperture

I have been having a lot of fun, and a little stress, about my new camera and have taken TONS of photos...so many that I have to combine two blogs into one.

So I started off learning about shutter speed.  Shutter speed is basically how long the shutter stays open while you take the picture.  The slower the shutter speed the more light that gets in ( I think) and is usually written in a fraction 1/1000 or whatever you have it set to.

This is usually what happens if you have a slow shutter speed (1/2) and it's sunny

You can barely see the picture because it lets in too much light

If you have a super fast shutter (1/4000) speed on a cloudy day you get this.

So it's important to learn to set the settings to the light.

I also learned a really cool trick with shutter speed too

So yeah you're probably wondering why I have a picture of my faucet.  I took this photo at probably a 1/100 shutter speed and it looks like well, a faucet, but check this out

Pretty cool, eh?  I set my shutter speed to 1/2000 and turned on the flash (which was the only way to make this work and TADA you can see the actual bubbles in the faucet!  I don't when I'll ever need or want a photo of a faucet but it;s still pretty cool.

The other cool thing I learned on my weekend trip to Ottawa was aperture.  Basically I think aperture is how wide the lens opens when you take a photo.  You can usually find it on your DSLR because it starts with an F, for example f/2, f/4.  I know that F stands for f-stop but I don't really know why.  In every day words if you have a smaller f-stop only one thing in particular will be in focus, if you have a larger f-stop everything you want to see will be in focus.  It's kind of cool because you can isolate something in particular and make it prominent.

Anyways in this case you need to pay attention to how the background branches are going in and out of focus.  I can't for the life of me remember the f-stop numbers though.

I also did a great example of how the apertures change effects pictures with these tulips.  Again you have to look at the background to really understand how the depth of field changes.

I also did a great example of how the apertures change effects pictures with these tulips