Technical skills

In our second lesson we learned about technical skills and how we can change them to manipulate elements as the amount of light and even how sharp the pictures are.

Shutter speed is what controls the light intensity that determines how much light enters the camera this varies between exposure times each picture takes. This has a dramatic impact in the appearance of moving objects, such as cars, people and natural elements such as water making them more exaggerated or even frozen. Slow shutter speed combined with planning the camera this can achieve a motion blur for moving objects.
An extended exposure can also allow photographers to catch brief flashes of light. Images taken with a lower shutter speed creates a visual effect of movement.

Shutter speed                         Typical examples

1 - 30+ seconds                     Night and low light photos
2 - 1/2 second                        It adds a silky smooth effect on water mainly used in landscapes
1/2 - 1/30 second                   for moving objects adding motion blur to the background
                                              carefully taken in hand held photographs
1/50 - 1/100 second               little to no zoom used in hand held photographs
1/250 - 1/500 second             freeze movements such as sport or an action
1/1000 - 1/4000 second         freeze fast movements close up

Aperture is a hole opening through the camera that enables light to travel. A cameras aperture is what determines a photps range of distance over which objects appear in sharp focus with a blurry effect around.
The f-stop is the name for aperture setting, for exampe the wider the opening area the smaller the f-stop. Everytime the f-stop value halves, the light-collection area quadruples. The standard f-stop numbers are; f/22, f/16, f/11, f/8.0, f/5.6, f/4.0, f/2.8, f/2.0, f,1.4. Although most cameras alow much finer adjustments, such as f./3.2, nd f/6.3. These adjustments can also very from camera and even lens.

For example a compact camera may have an available range of f/2.8 and f/8.0, while an SLR camera might have a different range of f/1.4 to f/32 (with a portait lense).

ISO determines how sensitive the camera is to incoming light, it is similar to shutter speed as it correlates 1:1 with how much exposure increases and decreases. Common ISO speeds include 100 200 400 and 800.

For exampe a compact camera the ISO has a range of 50-200 that normaly produces a low amount of image noise, on the other hand an SLR  camera  has a range of 50-800 (some even higher) with an acceptable amount of image noise.