Digital photography is a fun and refreshing hobby.
With the advancement of digital photography lengthy darkroom procedures have been made unnecessary.
This has enabled many people with a basic digital camera to start taking good photographs after a little practice and self tutoring.
This article will serve as a guide to master one of the trickiest things in digital photography - Exposure.
Exposure is the amount of light entering the camera through the lens and traveling to the sensor to create an image of the object being photographed.
It is controlled by setting the correct combination of shutter sped and aperture values corresponding to the set ISO.
Shutter speed in digital photography refers to the amount of time the shutter of a digital camera remains open.
Most professional digital DSLRs have shutter speeds setting options ranging between 30 seconds and one four thousandths of a second each setting being exactly "one stop" ahead of the last one; that is each setting offers about half the time than the last setting for which the shutter is opened.
Aperture refers to how much the adjustable aperture blades are opened.
The aperture number, increases as the size of the opening decreases.
The aperture number is denoted by f signs.
Every f stop is again one stop away from the nest one.
This means that the size of the opening is twice or half the size of the adjacent settings.
Keep these things in mind as you get down setting the correct exposure for your photographs.
However if your camera offers only an automatic setting where the camera adjust the exposure itself there is nothing for you to do.
But many compacts and all DSLRs have manual and aperture priority and shutter priority settings.
Use them to gain more control over exposure.
Only when you get to control exposure you can get moving photographs.
In a manual setting you will have to set both the shutter and aperture settings separately using some inbuilt meter as guide.
If you feel your subject is very fast like a sports car set a high shutter speed to freeze the movement and balance the aperture according to the shutter you choose using the meter.
Similarly to get an intentional motion effect in the form of a blur you can set a slower shutter speed.
Thus you can get more creative when you control the aperture settings.
You can use the aperture also to get creative effects.
Use a very small aperture number (that is a bigger opening) to get a very shallow Depth of Field or short range of lens focus.
In this way you can blur out areas in the picture which are too far behind the subject in the background so that they cannot lead the eye away.
Using the manual settings you can overexpose or underexpose a shot at will to get some fantastic off the beat results.
In the aperture mode you set the desired aperture while the camera sets the corresponding shutter automatically.
It is opposite in the shutter priority mode where you set the shutter and the aperture is set automatically.