DAY 101

PHOTOGRAPHY 101

Change One, Change Them Both

USING SHUTTER SPEED AND APERTURE TOGETHER

Since both the shutter speed and the aperture control the amount of light, it is important to use them in conjunction with each other.

First, you must find the proper exposure for the scene. The easiest way to do this is to check your in-camera light meter. Generally, when you look through the viewfinder of your camera, you will see something like this:

Part of the display shown above is the in-camera light meter, which will indicate if your camera settings are allowing in enough light.

Change your aperture and shutter speed settings until the in-camera light meter shows a proper light balance for your scene. If your shutter speed is too slow, you can increase the shutter speed. The important thing to remember here is that for every change to the shutter speed setting, you must compensate by changing the aperture setting in the opposite direction.

For example, if your settings are 1/30^th of a second and f/5.6, but you would prefer a 1/60^th of a second shutter speed, you must change your aperture to f/4. To break this down even further, you have decreased the amount of light entering your camera by half when you changed the shutter speed from 1/30^th to 1/60^th of a second. To compensate, you needed to double the light entering the camera by changing the aperture from f/5.6 to f/4. —CWN