Much ado about your camera
Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)
Most people do not understand how their tiny cameras work. A good number of them have a manual mode. They work well for specifics and more key projects and the like. The first thing you can control is the aperture. You can control it by raising up and down the F. The f and the number that follows it refers to the size of the lenses. The lower the value the large the hole. This makes the image brighter, but it sacrifices focus. The higher the value, the darker the image. It also makes it a lot more focused. Think of it like human eye.
Humans have to dilate their pupils to see in the darkness. However, everything looks blurry. With more brightness, people can focus better on smaller details. The camera was built to mimic the human eye. The shutter speed is how fast the image gets captured. The value is represented as 30'' to 1/2000. This represents units of speed. In the old days, they went crazy with the slow shutter speed. The photo came out decently, but if the person moved it was ruined. With better technology, the shutter speed was improved.
Still, slow shutter speed is needed for night photos. Just set the camera on a tripod and play the waiting game. The number between -2 and 2, refers to the exposure. To get a normal looking photo, you need to have the number at 0. Always keep track of that number when taking your photo. Still, there is a way to make use of both the -2 and the 2. If you take the same photo twice, but with difference exposures, you can combine them both with photoshop. It creates a pretty cool photo with both the foreground and the background well defined. Just keep this in mind when taking photos.
