A basic course in the fundamentals of photography: Aperture, exposure and shutter speed, and how you can get them to work together to deliver the result you want. Thanks to Flickr and Penmachine.com for their good picture examples.

1. Basic Photography Twist those dials with a purpose!

11. Touch those dials 2 Remember these settings are connected. So if one element goes up a stop, another has to go down to get a correct exposure. So if this picture is correctly exposed at 1/250, f/4, 200 ASA then the picture is also correctly exposed at 1/500, f/5.6, 800 ASA and 1/1000, f/1.4, 100 ASA, etc, etc. These example settings are charted out in the Exposure Values table to illustrate the concept: You can change any setting, as long as you adjust at least one other setting to compensate. 1/2000 1/1000 22 1/500 50 100 200 400 800 1600 3200 ISO (ASA scale) 16 11 8 5.6 4 2.8 2 1.4 1 Aperture (Measured in f/x) 1/250 1/125 1/60 1/30 1/15 1/8 1/4 ½ 1 Shutter speed (measured in seconds)

14. Aperture The higher your aperture ( remember: the smaller the number ), the less depth of field you will have in your picture and the faster everything in front and behind your point of focus will turn blurry and out of focus. f/1.8 f/5.6 f/14

15. ISO value The higher your ISO value, the more grain ( film ) or noise ( digital ) you will have in your picture. 25600 6400 200