Stepping outside the automatic comfort zone

When you decide to experiment with photography outside of the automatic setting on your camera, you may hit a slight problem; many of the websites you’ll turn to for advice will act as if you’re expected to learn every tiny little detail before you even take a picture. This can be intimidating, and frankly it’s just not necessary in the early days, so what we’re going to do is look at a couple of the most useful semi-automatic settings on a typical camera and discuss why you might want to use them.

As such, you’ll be able to pick holes in just about everything we discuss here if you want to, as it won’t cover everything and a lot of things will be simplified. This doesn’t matter - they’re still true and they still work, so the best bet is just to get on with it!

Your camera

We’re going to assume that you’re using a digital camera because as an enthusiastic beginner you probably won’t be diving straight into film. It’s also helpful to make that assumption because there are a lot of extra things to learn with film, there’s a cost involved in using it, and you won’t be able to see the results of your experiments as quickly.

You’ll probably have one of three types of camera; a compact, a bridge or an SLR. Compacts tend to be small and easy to handle, with a single lens. There’s a good chance they won’t have an optical viewfinder, which is a hole you look through to see the subject, but will allow you to compose the shot on their LCD screen instead. A bridge camera looks more like a traditional film camera but will still have a single fixed lens, although it may offer a much longer zoom than a compact. An SLR looks like a bridge, but you can change the lenses and you’ll also see the scene through the optical viewfinder exactly as it is in real life. We’ll ignore megapixels for the moment because any camera made in the last couple of years will probably have enough.

All of these cameras should offer you a fully automatic mode which will be just fine for many of your early experiments. Outside of this, the two settings on that complicated dial on the top or back that interest us most are aperture priority and shutter priority. Let’s take a look at what you might use them for.

Aperture Priority

You might have seen those photos where the subject is clearly in focus, but the background is all blurry. Your aperture priority mode is perfect for getting those kind of shots. What this mode will do is keep the camera almost fully automatic, but allow you to change the size of the aperture manually.

What’s an aperture? It’s just a hole inside the lens that allows light in, nothing more complicated than that. The bigger the hole, the more light gets in. The only bizarre thing about apertures is the way they’re measured – you’ll get a lower case letter ‘f’ followed by a number, and the smaller the number, the bigger the aperture. As an example, a lens with f/1.8 written on it has one of the biggest apertures you’ll get for sensible money. The biggest I know of is rated at f/0.95 but you don’t want to ask about the price.

So, why is this important? One reason – the bigger the aperture, the smaller the depth of field. Let’s get that term defined nice and early – the depth of field is how much is in focus in front of, and behind the thing you’re taking a photo of. A big depth of field will have just about everything in focus, a small depth of field will blur almost everything but your subject. By changing this setting (you’ll need to check how your camera does this, it’s usually a dial or switch) you can create all sorts of arty, blurry effects.

As an added extra, there’s a type of photography often known as Bokeh, which actually attempts to create a nice artistic blur. If you start with a large aperture (which gives a very small depth of field) and shoot something close to the lens with bright lights far behind it, you’ll see this effect for yourself.

Shutter Priority

Shutter priority works in the same way as aperture priority, but instead of allowing you to manually control the aperture, it lets you manually control the speed of the shutter. Nothing too complicated there.

The shutter speed of a camera is how quickly it takes a photo. If the shutter speed is very slow (say, one tenth of a second), things moving quickly past the camera will become blurry. The opposite is also true – if you shoot with a fast shutter speed (one thousandth of a second or more) you can catch drops of water as they fall, racing cars going past, athletes in mid air, etc.

So.. the answer is to always use a fast speed then? Why would you possibly want to take blurry photos? Artistic impression, that’s why. Blur creates the impression of speed and movement, and that can tell the viewer far more about the situation than a perfect freeze-frame. A great shot of a Formula 1 car with no blur at all can make it look like it’s standing still, when it’s really going at nearly 200mph. If you want detail, shoot fast; if you want artistic impression, consider shooting slower.

How do the shutter and aperture affect each other?

Taking photos is all about light - how much of it gets into the camera, and how long it takes. The aperture and shutter speed have to work perfectly together in order to make sure there’s enough light to take the photo you want. Lets think of this in terms of a see-saw, with the aperture sitting on one end and the shutter on the other. We’ll take for granted that there is a perfect amount of light needed to take a photo.

If we want a short depth of field we need a big aperture. As the aperture gets bigger it lets more light in. This means that the shutter needs to be open for less time to get to that perfect amount of light. The aperture size goes up, the shutter speed comes down, and they stay balanced.

If we want a large depth of field we need a small aperture. If the aperture size goes down, the shutter speed has to come up to keep the balance. This means it’ll stay open longer and might start to blur.

You can look at it the other way too – if we want a perfectly freeze-framed shot of a fast moving object, we need a fast shutter speed. If the shutter speed is coming down, the aperture on the other end of the see-saw has to go up. If we get a big aperture we automatically get a small depth of field, so that means that our fast moving object will be in perfect focus and the background will be blurry.

When you look at it like that, it’s really not that complicated. Choosing either aperture or shutter priority means the camera will take care of the other one for you so you don’t have to worry about it. If you ever wander towards fully manual photography you’ll have to balance them for yourself but we won’t go into that here.

Putting it into practice

Armed with this knowledge we can start to think about how a photo might come out before we’ve even taken it, and that’s a huge advantage when you’re being creative. Example:

It’s getting on into the evening and you know that a particular train comes over the local bridge with all the lights on. You think it’d make a nice shot against the darkening sky, so you decide to take a walk down there. Now it’s going to be a bit dark so your camera will need a lot of light. If you meet your light requirements with a big aperture, you get a small depth of field, which may capture the train but not the background or bridge.. hmm. On the bright side the shutter will be fast enough to freeze the train’s motion - remember our seesaw.

If you choose a slower shutter speed to get enough light in, it might cause the train to blur a bit because it’s moving, and that’s no use. You’ll get everything in focus because of the smaller aperture you’ll need, but it probably won’t be worth it unless you want to show movement. You decide that a slightly blurry background is the lesser of the evils, so you decide to use aperture priority and set your lens to the smallest number you’ve got. The shutter will take care of itself that way. You also decide to take a tripod with you just in case the shutter speed comes out a bit low, so you can avoid making the blur worse because the camera is shaking.

So, that’s your introduction to two of the most useful modes your camera has, and I hope that’s given you enough of an understanding to start playing around with them. If you produce any images you’re proud of as a result we’d like to see them!