In the last few weeks a handful of friends have asked me to teach them to take decent photographs - maybe I'm nuts but I agreed, and being the good ex-teacher that I am I decided that I should come up with some sort of syllabus and figured that while I'm at it I may as well share my five cents worth with those that care to read it.
So the major thing about photography (apart from those other minor things like the right gear, a decent subject, composition, time, money etc) is light. Light, light, light, light, light. If you don't have light you have a plain black block. If you have too much light you have a plain white block.
Photography is about the artistic representation and the technical manipulation of light. In terms of manipulating light you can manipulate your external light and you can control the way in which your camera responds to that light.
Cameras don't see light the same way human beings do. We can access a huge range of light while a camera's light range is limited. What that means is that at the same time as being able to see very bright things we can also see very dark things. A camera can do one or the other but it typically can't do both at the same time.
So it's up to you, the person behind the lens, to make decisions for the camera about how it should record light.
A typical Sunday morning and all the animals are in the sun spot on the bed. Notice how the light areas have blown out (meaning you can't see detail in the blanket and duvet in the front of the image)? That's what I mean by the camera not being able to record light the same way we see it. We could see the whole scene perfectly - the bright sunlight on the bed and the darker room - but the camera only really records Ninja (our stripey cat) properly.There are three major controls that your camera has in order to deal with light and they typically work simultaneously . Because I'm not sick, twisted or evil I'm not going to explain all three things together, but look at the three things in three different lessons and then talk in a fourth about how they all work together.
The three controls are aperture, shutter speed and ISO. If you're new to photography and you don't have a Scooby about what those things are, don't worry - we're all in the process of learning different things all the time and while I'm pretty good at photography I wouldn't try and perform knee replacement surgery.
The easiest place to start is aperture. Also referred to as f-stop.
Whenever you take a photograph a mechanism in the lens opens to allow light in.
That mechanism is your aperture or f-stop. If it opens wide then you'll allow in a lot of light. If it opens small you'll allow in very little light.
Unfortunately for people trying to learn this stuff from scratch some brainiac years ago decided that the numbering system we use to describe the size of the apperture should be ass backward! I can only assume it was a Frenchman who came up with that.
So what this means is: a very large open aperture (f-stop) that lets in a lot of light will be described by a small number, for example f2.8
A very small aperture which lets in a teeny amount of light will be described by a large number f32
Go figure, but that's the way it is.
So the first thing that you should do, now that you're armed with this golden McNugget of information is wonder around for a few days with your camera set to AV (which means aperture priority) and see what happens when you change your aperture from a high f-stop (small opening) to a low f-stop (big opening).
