Camera settings
Go manual and take full advantage of your camera. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO all affect the quality of your photos. If you want to take photos in low light or capture fast action you'll want to open the aperture and up the shutter speed. Want a rich bokeh behind a subject? Open that aperture.
Here's a cheat sheet to keep it all straight.
If you’re already familiar with video cameras, you know aperture as iris; it’s the same thing. Aperture (or iris) is the size of the opening of your lens; shutter speed is the amount of time it takes to open and close the shutter, and ISO is the equivalent to film speed (ASA) or how sensitive film is to light.
The aperture opening is not measured by the size of the opening of the lens, but rather in an f-stop number derived by focal length of the lens divided by the diameter of the aperture. Thus, aperture is expressed as a ratio. That means that, like a fraction, f/2 is larger than f/4, just as 1/2 is larger than 1/4. However, in the case of lens apertures, f/2 is actually four times as large as f/4. A typical lens has markings f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22 — each number represents an aperture opening that admits half as much light as the one before. As we mentioned in class, as the number gets larger, the aperture opening gets smaller. Obviously, the larger the aperture, the more light is let in. Other than lightness or brightness what does that mean? A larger aperture (small f-number) the shallower the depth of field. So, if you want the background to be blurry, use a large aperture. Not all lenses can open equally as wide. The wider open the aperture, the “faster” a lens is deemed to be.
Shutter speed is measured in fractions of seconds and fractions of seconds. The bigger the denomination, the faster the speech (for example, 1/1000 is faster than 1/60). It’s common to use 1/60th of a second or faster. It’s difficult to use anything slower without a tripod. Typical options on a DSLR are 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8. In order to freeze fast actions, such as sports, you should use a faster shutter speed.
All these settings work in concert. If you use a faster shutter speed, you’re letting in less light into your camera. To compensate, you’ll likely increase your aperture or use a faster ISO. (The most common ISOs are: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200.) Many DSLRs allow you to either choose fully manual (in which you choose both the aperture and shutter speed) or aperture priority (in which you choose the aperture and the camera automatically chooses the shutter speed) or shutter priority (in which you choose the shutter speed and the camera automatically chooses the proper aperture setting).
You can go into a little deeper detail and see some instructional videos. Watch for the following posts.