As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.

We are beginning a series we are going to call photography basics to help explore the basics of digital photography. While the focus is on digital photography, all of the concepts will apply whether you are shooting film or digital. In this first installment we are going to look at how to control exposure by manipulating the different settings on the camera such as ISO, Shutter, and Aperture. Upcoming installments will focus on other areas such as depth of field, motion control, and specific shooting scenarios.

I have been wanting to write this article for some time now… ever since I received a really bad fake SandDisk Ultra II Compact Flash card a few years back. After doing some research online, I found a few others that were getting the same crap cards from their online purchases.

Although you may think that no two situations are alike, the fact is that there are quite a few constants that you can rely on to give you a good starting point. The sun is one of these things you can count on to be consistent. Of course there are things that affect the sun’s output like the time of day, haze, fog, and clouds, but on a bright sunny day the light output is very consistent and knowing the camera settings for this condition will give you a guideline to make adjustments. This is where the “sunny 16″ rule comes into play.

We have done a number of articles with different flash heads but we have never gone into the detail of how to set them up and make them work, this results in emails that we sit and explain all the details to people. So today I am going to go through how to setup these studio flashes and connect them to your camera to get the results you want.

A big stumbling block for many new camera users is how to figure out how much depth of field a particular image will have it in given the focal length of the lens, the aperture used and the distance to the subject. Trust me on this, trying to do the algebra to figure it out is not something most people want to try to do in their heads. In this article we will cover all of the math involved and then make it real easy with an Excel spreadsheet and some links to some free applications to help you out.

A common issue some people have is getting their images to portray a sense of movement. Today we are going to look at how adjusting our shutter speed can help achieve the desired look that we want. For this simple example we will look at a ceiling fan taken at different shutter speeds so you can see how adjusting the shutter speed through an entire typical range can help you achieve the exact look you are aiming for.

One thing that seems to baffle a lot of new photographers is understanding the term “stop” as it pertains to a measurement of light. We see this word used over and over with regards to shutter speed, aperture, film speed, filters, lighting, and other ways that light is used. You may hear a phrase like “you should expose one side of face 1-2 stops under the lit side of the face and expose the background 1 stop under the main subject”. For many people that’s about like asking them to solve a complex calculus problem.

This week we sat down with our friend David from Esquire Photography to discuss different aspects of wedding photography. What we thought was going to be a quick discussion turned into almost 90 minutes of everything from technique, to contracts, to workflow, and much more.

It’s the height of the wedding season now and people that are shooting their first weddings or considering shooting a wedding should know a few tips to make sure the day goes as smooth as possible. Since weddings are our primary income here we figured we would pass along a number of our favorite tips and tricks.