Apertures and shutter-speeds are vital in photography. Aperture is the size of the hole in the lens, and shutter-speed is how fast the shutter closes and opens. Aperture is a little harder to understand. If you have a camera, but you don’t know how to use the setting quite right, get it and follow my lead. First, you need to switch the dial on the left to M, or Manual. After that, rotate the dial that is located on the back of your camera, on the left side. Rotate it, and you’ll se a number on the command dial with around. The number has an “F” next to it, that stands for “F-stop.” Okay, read this carefully, the higher the number, the smaller the hole letting the light in is. And the smaller the number is, the bigger the hole is. And if the hole is small, the lighting around you must be bright enough to get a nice picture. And when you have big hole, you should be in low light, so the camera does not soak in too much light.

Shutter-speeds are a bit easier. The dial on the front of the camera is what controls Shutter. When you turn that, another number starts switching around. When you turn it, and the number gets really big, like 5000, that stands for one 5000/sec, not 5000 seconds. When the number gets down to 1, quotations will form around it. That means 1 second. My camera goes to “30.” Anyways, the very small numbers are really fast shutter-speeds, so not much light soaks in. That is good to use in low aperture numbers, so you don’t let so much light get in. If you want more detail, go to the Great Courses Plus, and listen to Joel Sartore’s lecture on Shutter-speeds, and his lecture on Apertures and Depth of Field.