Carolyn Erickson

Lesson 2, Jodie Coston’s Free Online Photography Course at Morguefile

The lesson this week focuses (ha ha) on how shutter speed and aperture affects your pictures. This is EXACTLY what I’ve been so keen to learn. Although this assignment was way difficult on my little “prosumer” Canon, I am starting to get the hang of it and (after many failed attempts) have some pictures to post.

Using a fast shutter speed freezes an instant in time. The shutter opens and closes very quickly, so very little light is able to get in. I was having problems with my “freeze-frame” pictures being too dark, even when I adjusted the aperture to its widest available setting (which lets in the most light). On my Canon S3, that setting is f2.7, but sometimes it won’t even go that low, depending on various other settings. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. I don’t understand it either.)

Anyway, I couldn’t get enough light by widening the aperture alone. I had to increase my camera’s ISO. If you’re old-school like me and used to buy film for your camera, you might remember that ISO referred to the speed of your film. 200-speed film was good for taking daytime shots outside; 400-speed was good for indoors; 800-speed was for low-light conditions. On a digital camera, you can adjust your “film” speed without ever stopping by the drugstore for a new roll.

But on my Canon - and I think on other digital cameras as well - the higher the ISO speed, the higher the possibility of getting a grainy image. So I had to balance all these different things - shutter-speed, aperture, and ISO - to get a photo of water droplets hanging in the air, which was my goal.

1/1250, f3.5, ISO 200

Water droplets suspended in air! Yayyyy! Finally! (I took hundreds of photos. 457 to be exact. I am so loving the digital camera age. If I had to develop all that film, I wouldn’t be able to pay my high-speed Internet bill.)

It’s still a little dark. I could have raised the ISO a bit more, but didn’t want to risk getting a grainy photo. I’m okay with it for now. As long as I am absolutely perfect sometime in the very, very near future, I’ll cut myself some slack.

With the slow-motion pictures - in other words, the ones that don’t suspend a moment in time but rather make the movement of an object very obvious by blurring it - you have to do the exact opposite with your aperture and shutter speed. (Makes sense.) Slow the shutter down, leaving it open longer. The camera catches everything that happens in front of its lens while that shutter is open, which results in the blurring of any objects that happen to be moving. You can use this to indicate speed and motion. For instance, if you see a photo of a guy on a racing bike, and there’s a blurring of the wheels that show you he’s going really fast, the photographer used a slow shutter speed.

But you know how a fast shutter speed doesn’t let in a lot of light? The exact opposite happens when you have a really slow shutter speed. LOTS and lots of light can come in, because the shutter is open longer. So you have to compensate by making the hole that lets light in (the aperture) as small as possible. And, if you are at the lake on a sunny day, you also have to get your ISO down to 80 and find a shaded area to shoot.

Here are two pictures for comparison. The photograph taken with a fast shutter speed on top, and the photograph taken with a slow shutter speed below it. See the difference?

1/1250, f3.5, ISO 200

1/50, f8.0, ISO 80

 You can also see how the one on top is darker than the one below it. That’s called “operator malfunction.” I’m a newbie and didn’t adjust the settings exactly right. I took the photos at the same spot, only moments apart, but it was difficult to see the LCD in the sun and I couldn’t tell if I was getting it adjusted correctly. Again, I’ll forgive myself this time.

What do you think of the results? Do you know any tricks for getting better results?

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