WARNING: The following contains information of great magnitude. If you read what’s below and apply the concepts, your photography will improve exponentially. This week’s tips are the keys to the Ferrari to allow you to command the end look to all your images. Take time to digest every letter, utilize the concepts and you’ll see a drastic improvement in your images.
When you take control of the aperture, you begin to take charge of the photograph’s end result. When you take control of the shutter speed, you begin to take charge of the photograph’s end result. When you take control of both, you take complete charge of the photograph’s end result.
In Aperture Priority Mode, the shutter speed floats, and if enabled, so does the ISO. The camera can choose both of those aspects. You control depth of field and the amount of light.In Shutter Priority Mode, the aperture floats, and if enabled, so does the ISO. The camera chooses both of those aspects. You control subject/camera movement and the amount of light.In Manual Mode, the photographer controls the aperture, shutter and ISO manually.
Regardless of the mode a photographer implements, it’s essential he or she is fully cognizant of the aperture, shutter and ISO in order to control the final look.
In this week’s tip, I focus on Aperture Priority. For the seven accompanying images, I dispense reasons why I chose the given settings for each. This information will provide insight as to how the settings I chose impacted the end result.
Giraffe (Above)
I used a 600mm lens on a 1.5 crop sensor body, which made the effective focal length 900mm. The ISO was set to 400 and the aperture was wide open at ƒ/4. I looked through the viewfinder and loved how the giraffe stood out from the background. I also made sure the entire giraffe was sharp from the tip of the nose to its rump. Had it not been, I’d have stopped down the lens to attain greater depth of field. Given the distance of the background from the giraffe, it fell out of focus. If they were close, it wouldn’t be possible to capture an out-of-focus background. Background-to-subject distance plays a huge part in determining the given effect of depth of field. I kept the ISO at 400 in that the shutter speed of 1/1250 sec. was fast enough to freeze the slow-moving giraffe.