I hope this post doesn’t seem too basic but I thought it would be useful to outline the major settings of a camera so that all the bases are covered, rather than assume everyone knows already. Especially since I have only started experimenting with some of them properly since getting a new camera.

Shutter speed, aperture and ISO are the three major options that can be change when taking a photograph, there are several other more complicated ones like the white balance etc, but I will come to them later. Taking a quick look at each of them in turn.

Shutter speed. This is very simply how long the shutter stay open for. This directly affects the amount of light that enters the camera and therefore how dark or light your picture is.

Varying the shutter speed can also have the effect of stopping or showing motion in your picture. A very fast shutter speed will freeze all the movement in your picture and there will be no (or very little) blurring from moving objects. A slow shutter speed can allow you to show some movement in the picture. For example like I was doing with my water pictures in this post. So the shutter speed is a careful balance between how much light you need to make things show up in the picture and how much blur you want.

It’s also worth noting at this point that blur can come from two sources, objects moving in the picture, and the camera shaking. The first you can do nothing about and need a fast camera speed. The second you can combat using a tripod and self-timer.

Aperture. This is the size of the hole through which light can enter the camera. Its size is recorded in F-stops (about which I shall post again later). Suffice to say a small F-number means a bigger aperture and more light and a large F-number means a smaller aperture and less light. It also has an impact on the depth of field but that will be another post.

ISO. This used to relate to how sensitive film was to light (also referred to as how “fast” film was). Now digital cameras achieve the same thing (ISO equivalent or ISOe) by varying the sensitivity of the sensor. This means that you can take pictures in a lower light level with a faster shutter speed, particularly good if you want to hand-hold pictures in a low light level like a church. The disadvantage is that in increasing the sensitivity it causes noise to be added to the picture which degrades the overall quality. Ideally you want to set the ISO as low as possible (i.e. use a tripod and longer shutter time if possible before you increase it). Although it’s much easier to change ISO with a digital camera (flick a switch) than with a film camera (change the film)!

So, as you can see, taking a correctly exposed photograph is a careful balance between these three settings. The problem is that most compacts won’t give you control over the aperture and shutter speed, but they will usually the ISO. Sometimes you can “fool” a compact by focusing on one part of the image to set the exposure you want, hold the button half down and then reframe the image. Most DSLRs will let you control them all, depending on which mode you use. So experiment and see what effects they have.

There are two important things to realise about photography (well probably not true, there are many, but more of them later).

One, light is the most important things for photography, without good light you are just asking to fail. And most photography books and magazines will say as much. The problem is about being in the right place at the right time, and that’s the value of photography, sometimes the chances of being able to recreate a specific shot are very slim, or would possibly involve a trip to the other side of the world.

The second factor is the camera you have doesn’t really matter. Oh don’t get me wrong there are limits to what you can achieve with some cameras, but the photographer and what they can see is far more important. You may have to fight with your camera to make it do what you want (I know, I have done it), but being able to spot a good image is key. So the best piece of advise I can give you is simply keep your camera with you at all times (whatever you camera may be). If I didn’t have my camera with me lots of the time I would never have found this picture. I was simple trying to keep out of the rain and I think this is one of my favourite images. It’s taken at the front of a theatre in Toronto where they have some large reflective panels.

Reflections, Toronto

Oh yeah, and cliché though it sounds, practice really does help.

On my recent holiday in Devon I discovered just how useful a Neutral Density (ND) filter can be. While I was there I was trying to take pictures of waterfalls there I wanted to try out the effect of making the water look silky smooth. To do this I needed an extended exposure time so that all the movement blurred out. I minimised the size of the aperture that I was using to reduce the amount of light entering, however I could still only use a shutter speed of about 0.3 of a second, and this just wasn’t producing the effect I wanted.

To get around this I have recently discovered ND filters, they are dark glass filters that reduces the amount of light getting through by a number of stops. You can get them in varying strengths depending on how much you want to reduce the light by. For what I wanted to do they were prefect as they allowed me to increase the shutter time to about 1.5 seconds and hence blur all the water producing a very nice effect.

Also connected to ND filters are ND Grad filters. These perform the same effect, reducing the amount of light, however they are clear at one side, dark at the other and graduated in-between. These can be useful if you want to take sunsets and still have foreground details, since the sky will be very bright. I plan to add these to my list of camera accessories that I want.

Another place I want to try using an ND filter is at the coast, to create the same silky water effect.

Finally I recently read in a magazine that ND filters can be good for taking photos in crowded places. Set up and use a dark ND filter so that you can extend the shutter time to 15 or 30 seconds without over exposing. That way all the moving people in the picture will magically disappear!

Below are some of the photos I have taken using this effect, you can clearly see the difference the ND filter makes, allowing a longer exposure for the better silky water image, while not causing over-exposure.

Do check back again soon as I will be adding pictures from Devon shortly.

I received a Gorillapod for my birthday. For those who don’t know this is a small tripod with movable legs that you can twist around things to attach to poles or make a level platform on any surface. It has to be one of the most useful additions to my camera kit. It is small and easy to carry anywhere and provides a stable platform for my camera. No longer do I have to precariously balance it on any flat object to take those difficult low light shots.

When coupled with use of the self-timer feature this can provide a quick and simple way to take fantastic low light shots. Even balancing the camera on a nearby wall or against a lamp-post can work, the important thing is that using the self-timer means you don’t jog the camera when you take the picture.

If the place you have the camera is stable it also means you can take pictures with a longer exposure and larger aperture, rather than increasing the ISO, which results in a less noisy picture.

Have a look at the New York gallery for an example of good night photography.

Most cameras will let you set the self timer for only 2 seconds so that you don’t have to wait forever, and this is extremely useful.

More night photography is on my to do list, so watch out for more interesting cityscape pictures coming soon.

These are a couple of the shots I have taken using the above technique,

Boston Skyline, Night

Port of San Francisco Building