Aperture

There are a number of results of changing the aperture of your shots that you’ll want to keep in mind as you consider your setting but the most noticeable one will be the depth of field that your shot will have.

Depth of Field (DOF) is that amount of your shot that will be in focus. Large depth of field means that most of your image will be in focus whether it’s close to your camera or far away. For example the landscape shot above has an aperture of f/16 and the result is that both the mountain in the background and the boats in the foreground remain in focus.

Small (or shallow) depth of field means that only part of the image will be in focus and the rest will be fuzzy (like in the portrait at the top of this post. You’ll see in it that the subjects eyes are in focus but the background is blurred. Even her hair which is only a little behind her eyes is blurred. This is a very shallow depth of field and was taken with an aperture of f1.8).

Similarly this creative birth announcement image was shot at f1.8 and again you see the shallow depth of field with the ultrasound in focus but everything else blurred.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed, also known as “exposure time”, stands for the length of time a camera shutter is open to expose light into the camera sensor. If the shutter speed is fast, it can help to freeze action completely, as seen in the above photo of the dolphin. If the shutter speed is slow, it can create an effect called “motion blur”, where moving objects appear blurred along the direction of the motion. This effect is used quite a bit in advertisements of cars and motorbikes, where a sense of speed and motion is communicated to the viewer by intentionally blurring the moving wheels.