This was shot with a smaller aperture to maximize depth of field and have both the bridge and the footprints in the snow in focus.

In case you did not know this about me, I work in a .  A pretty awesome camera store at that.  There are few better ways for someone passionate about photography to spend their work day than working with other photographers and their photography.  As such, one of the things I like most about my job is that it is not just about selling cameras.  With each camera we sell, it is as easily about educating that person in how to use their camera as it is about them actually buying it.  I love the educational aspect of my job.  It gives as much back to me behind the counter as those in front of the counter tend to get.  In fact it is extremely rare that a day goes by that I do not learn something new, generally spurred by a question a customer has come in with.

Anyway, one of the things I have the privilege of explaining frequently is shutter speeds and apertures.  I never find it a mundane conversation.  I remember all too well those early days of fumbling with an aperture-thingy that was well beyond my understanding.  I just knew that rotating that ring made the needle in my meter move up and down and I had to get it in the center.  Really, that was the bulk of my understanding of apertures at one point.  Not an iota more.

Understanding shutter speeds and apertures is really important.  Basically every single camera in existence uses them from your cell phone, to your pinhole, to your 5D, to your B&J 8×10.  (I give bonus points to those who can tell me any of the remarkably few ways to make an image without a shutter, aperture or both ;-D)

Yet for as important as apertures and shutters are, they can be a slippery subject.  Early on they can be unfathomable in their complexity and later on they become so second nature as to be taken for granted.  So this next bit is meant as a primer for those new to the subject and a refresher for those not.  Because every time I get to teach them over the counter I am reminded of their importance myself.

I generally start off by comparing a shutter and an aperture to the workings of the eye.  refers to the hole created by the aperture blades, generally inside your lens.  If you set your camera to f11 and your shutter to 1 second and look down into the lens as you depress your shutter you will see a number of blades closing down to form a smaller hole in the middle of your lens.  That is your aperture.  In relation to your eye, it is like your pupils.  When things get bright, those blades contract to allow less light to pass through.  When things get dark, they open up allowing more light in.  The measurement of this opening is represented by the numbers on your aperture scale which generally read something like 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4 ,5.6… sound familiar?  The lower a number is, the wider the opening and hence the more light that passes through.  Apertures like 16, 22, and 32 are smaller openings that allow much less light in.  Generally a lens’ fastest aperture is considered its “speed”.  This is why most lenses are demarcated by their focal length followed by their maximum aperture, such as “50mm 1:1.2″  The aperture is expressed as a ratio, but the important number is that which follows the colon.  So this 50mm would have a maximum aperture of 1.2, which allows a lot of light through the lens and is considered very fast.  This would be a grand lens for low light photography where you want to preserve high shutter speeds.

Apertures represent one-half of an exposure.  They control how much light passes through your lens.  That is why they are so important when it comes to flash photography and night time shots of the stars.  When using a flash, the flash fires so fast that your shutter catches its full intensity everytime, regardless of your shutter speed* (I put an asterisk there because there is more to that statement that I am not going to get into tonight).  So the only way to limit how much of that flash-provided light hits your film is by closing your aperture to allow less of it to pass through your lens.  Same with stars.  If you use a smaller aperture while doing star trails, the dimmer stars’ illumination will be cut out if you use too small of an aperture.

And if that were not confusing enough, aperture also controls your depth of field, which is how big an area of your photo that is in focus.  Those wider apertures have narrower focus, while the smaller apertures have greater fields of focus.  For example, focus on some flowers on the ground in front of you that are… say… five feet away with an aperture of no more than f4.  Now without changing your focus look at something on the horizon.  It will be out of focus.  Your depth of field at f4 is generally not great enough to bring things at great distances apart into focus at the same time.  To remedy this close down to f11 or 16 or even 22.  The further down you go, the greater the distances between near and far you can bring into focus simultaneously.  This is a popular technique for landscape photography.  But it works in reverse too.  Say you have some friends who want a portrait, but they insist on standing in front of a dumpster.  Well try a wider aperture, with an aperture of 1.8 or 1.4 you might find that you can focus on their faces and put that nasty dumpster behind them unrecognizably out of focus.

So that is half of the equation.  Shutter speeds are the second half.  If the aperture is to your pupils, shutters are like your eyelids in that they blink.  The speeds displayed are generally a fraction of a second, so 60 is really 1/60th of a second and so on.  Some cameras will display this as 1/60 and some as just 60.  The higher the number, the faster the blink and the lower the number the slower the blink.  Faster blinks allow the film to see less unless the light is brighter.  Sort of the same as blinking rapidly in bright daylight and then again in a gloomy room.  In lower light you see less the faster you blink.  Same with cameras.

Here I used a shutter speed of about 1/4th of a second so I could pan the image, creating this abstract, blurred effect.

Also like apertures, shutter speeds have a secondary purpose as well.  Faster speeds will freeze movement while slower speeds blur it.  For example, 1/60th is generally fast enough to make someone walking look like they were standing still with no blur.  But if they were to run 1/60th would result in a bit of a blur.  You would need to increase to 1/125th if you wanted to freeze a runner.  Now if they hop in their car and start driving away 1/125th is likely to result in blur as well and you would need to go up to 1/250th or even 1/500th if they were in a big hurry to get away.  On the other end of the scale, take those silky waterfall shots we are all so fond of.  To blur water like that, simply set your shutter speed to 1/4th, 1/2 or even 1 full second.  As long as your camera is stable on a tripod, only those things in motion (the water in this case) will blur through the long exposure.

Shutter speed becomes important when trying to determine when it is safe to hand hold and when it is not.  The general rule of thumb is 1/60th and above a normal person can hold stable.  Anything slower and you had better brace the camera.  This is because that person walking or that water falling is not the only motion a shutter controls.  The act of hand holding a camera introduces motion since none of us hold perfectly still.  If you look through your lens while holding your camera you will see that you dip, duck and weave all over the place.  The camera records this motion too.  That is why too slow of a shutter and you get “camera shake”.  I take that rule above a step further though and usually say that your slowest shutter speed should match the focal length of your lens.  For example, if you have a 50mm, you should shoot no slower than 1/50th of a second (or the closest equivalent).  But if you put on that 100mm lens you had better kick your shutter speed up to 1/100th of a second and up to 1/200th if you put on that 200mm lens.  This is because telephoto lenses magnify everything, include that natural camera shake.

Phew.

Now that we have gotten this far, it is important to realize that there is a relationship between these two.  If you close down your aperture and allow less light in, you need to slow your shutter down to compensate.  What the aperture takes away the shutter needs to make up.  Conversely, when you adjust your shutter speed, you will need to make sure your aperture is set to balance those changes.  These two work in tandem and both are equally important in creating an exposure.  Generally the change from one aperture number to a next is measured in “stops”.  Going from f4 to f5.6 is one stop, in this case one less stop of light.  Going from f11 to f8 is gaining one stop of light.  The same holds true of shutter speeds.  Increasing your shutter from 1/60th to 1/125th decreases your exposure by one stop, while slowing down from 1/60th to 1/30th increases your exposure by one stop.  So if you change your shutter by one stop towards overexposure but do not change your aperture, then your image will be slightly overexposed.

This gets a bit more tricky these days with modern cameras.  It used to be that all the numbers on your aperture and shutter speed dials were in exactly one stop increments.  Many modern cameras display in 1/2 or even 1/3 stop increments so your shutter readout might actually go from 1/60 to 1/80 to 1/100 to 1/125.  This can get confusing.  The way to keep this straight is if you want to increase your shutter speed by a stop, double it.  So one stop above 1/60th is doubled to 1/125.  To decrease by a stop, halve it to 1/30th.  To decrease by another full stop you halve again to 1/15th and so on.  Apertures double every two stops.  So changing from f2.8 to f5.6 is actually decreasing your exposure by two full stops.  The number in between is f4, which is your one stop mark there.  But once you know that, then you know that one stop over 5.6 is actually just double f4, in this case f8 and one stop over that then would be double of f5.6, so f11 and one stop more would be double f8 so f16.  See how this goes?

Double phew.

Anyway, that is the gist of my aperture/shutter speed lecture.  I hope it is useful to some, and a good reminder to others.  I hope some other night to sit down and write a bit more in depth on how to use these features a bit more creatively.  Actually I plan to definitely do so for my creative landscape class coming up at , which is probably why all this is on my mind to begin with, as I am getting prepared for that.

I do think fundamentals like this are important.  I do not think they are absolutely necessary, and relying on them too heavily has its own dangers (see my on that). Anyway, this was all meant to help and I hope it does.  I know they can be a terribly confusing subject, and therefore can be embarrassing to have to ask to be explained.  But then again, we all have to start there at some point.

A nightbound train passing by the St. Johns Bridge

I am going to risk putting myself out on a limb here (oh god, not even beyond the first sentence without a pun, bodes ill this does), but I want to discuss a bit about what makes photography…worthwhile, at least on a personal level.  It is often a bit awkward for me to tackle such subjects in a forum such as Flickr, much easier to discuss things like this in a more personal nature, I often worry that tone or intent will be misconstrued.  A small worry, but a bit of one nonetheless.  Mainly because I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all.  I don’t, in case you wondered.  And as I often say, I don’t even necessarily believe much of what I write to be true.  I am perfectly capable of being wrong as well.  But it is not really the being wrong or right, for which I write, it is the attempt to make myself more aware of how I think and act in regards to photography that is a valuable exercise in and of itself.  Hence these “essays”.

But moving on now.  I get a fair number of e-mails, of which I try to answer most every one.  My photography does a fair amount of inspiring ( a good thing, which always flatters me) but it also does a fair amount of impressing ( less of a good thing).  I get a lot of e-mails asking for advice, which I happily give even if I never really feel like I know exactly what to say.  Seems like such a simple question, but each time I wonder if I managed to say just the right thing to fan the flame of their creative spark, or if I missed the target altogether.

Anyway, I was laying on the couch the other evening, trying to drift off and take a nap and my brain had other ideas, some of them good enough that I decided to get up and make a post of them regarding the value we assign our photography, because this is an important concept when it comes to becoming a better photographer, in my opinion.

First off: Your photography is not limited by your camera, nor your lens.  It is not limited by shutter speeds, aperture, film, focus, flash, white balance, color, black and white, grain, noise, etc.  It is not limited by your budget nor your education.  It is not, and I repeat, not, limited by light.  It is certainly not limited by where you live or where you go.  Your photography is limited simply and quite importantly, only by your own imagination and vision.  All those factors I mentioned (and more) can certainly affect your photography, but ultimately you make of it what you will.  Photography begins and ends with the photographer, the best light in the world, or most advanced metering system will not change that.

Second:  Getting published is great.  So is selling photographs.  Making explorer can be flattering.  So is getting hundreds of comments and favorites.  Being profiled with a book or on TV is impressive.  A long resume of accomplishments always looks nice.  So does a polished portfolio of stunning images that draws oohs and aahs.  But when it comes down to it, all this stuff is icing on the cake.  Sweet but not too fulfilling.  Whether you are just starting out in photography or not, but particularly if you are, don’t approach it thinking one or more of things these have to be accomplished before you become a worthwhile photographer.  As I said above, all your photography begins and ends with you, not with Popular Photography Magazine or MOMA or contest prizes or Explorer hits.

Your photography will never be more valuable than the value you place in it that split second before

you hit the shutter button.

What matters most happens before the picture is even taken, not after.  The worth of your photography is in what gets you up at 4 am in the morning to brave freezing conditions in hopes of a sunrise.  It is what makes you follow your children around all day long patiently snapping frame after frame.  It is what causes you to drive for miles, or walk them, in search of that moment, be it in the middle of a sprawling urban landscape or a natural one.  It is significantly in what keeps you picking up that camera as the fractions of seconds become days, the days months, the months pool into years, and beyond.  It is in this desire to see, to experience, to feel, to celebrate, to remember, to be a part of, to be amazed or amused, that you will find what makes your photography worthwhile.  Everything that comes after the snap of the shutter is merely added drama, and it is never as important as you think it is.

If you can take this to heart, and mind, to shoot more freely from so many of these false limitations that we impose on ourselves way too often, the most common of which is to model your photography off of other people’s expectations of it.  Then you will also discover that the most important thing is to pursue your photography in a way that is your own.  Make your photography yours, it will show.

And I will be honest, regardless of how lucid I described what I am hoping I described, or how easy I made it sound, the process is neither to go through, at least for me it wasn’t.  It does not happen overnight.  Sometimes the proverbial lightbulb will switch on, but count yourself lucky if you experience this.  I think most people reach that point by stumbling through murky gray areas feeling out their own creative nature.  And this is something important to remember too.  All those really good photographers you look up to and wish to emulate?  They were all awkward novices at one point too.  Stumbling along lost at times themselves.  If a photographer tries to tell you otherwise, he is either full of himself (or herself) or has an awful memory.  Really, one of the most important traits to adopt in your photography is not actually creativity, but dedication.  You know, long term patience.  Passion helps too.  Passion is fuel for dedication.

Hmm, this is about the part where I finally decided to get up and start typing, so this is kind of the end of this train of thought (sorry another bad pun to close this out).  I do hope some of this helps.  I sometimes think photography is all about vision, but not always in terms of how well we see what is in front of us, quite often it involves how we see ourselves too.  We each come with all the truly essential tools we need to be good photographers, but make no mistake, we can still do quite a bit to sabotage our own abilities if we aren’t aware of the subversive ways in which we do it.

In terms of this photo, I took this one night a month or so ago out shooting the St. Johns Bridge with Aaron.  In fact you can see his shot taken right beside me . I figured the bridge would make a good subject to accompany what I wanted (to try) to say today.

Thanks again for reading along this far.