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Have you just bought – or been given – your first digital camera? Congratulations and welcome to a new world of opportunity and adventure!

If you’ve got a digital SLR camera or an advanced compact digital, you now need to be prepared for a steep learning curve of new ideas, language and jargon and the good news is that it’s not as difficult or scary as it first seems. A few digital photography tips can go a very long way to helping!

I know I was attracted to digital photography as a hobby because I wanted to take stunning pictures – you know, those wonderful soft focus portraits or a lone snowdrop poking through the freshly fallen snow. I’d have been equally happy to capture an all-energy action shot, my brother playing in a football game or a dog shaking after a swim in the lake. We’ve all seen them and I just knew that a digital SLR camera was to door to success here.

What I hadn’t quite grasped was the technical knowledge I’d need to gain.

OK, most good cameras have an automatic mode where everything is done for you… but if I’d wanted the camera to do it all, I’d have bought a point-and-shoot. So where to start on the learning?

Aperture seemed to be a pretty easy concept to master.

The aperture on a camera controls the amount of light that enters the camera, in exactly the same way as the pupil in your eye does the same job for you. Go into a dark or dimly lit room and your pupils open wide to let in as much light into your eye as possible. Turn on the lights and immediately your pupil reacts by closing to a pinhole size.

The difference is that with a digital SLR camera, you can control the aperture size depending on the effect that you want to create in the photo shot.

There are two different ways of talking about aperture: you can talk about Aperture Value numbers (shortened to AV numbers) or f/stop values. These have two different numerical scales and what they have in common is: the smaller the number, the bigger the hole and the more light that enters your camera.

I know this feels like the wrong way round but it’s easy to remember: the smaller the number, the bigger the hole.

So how can we use this knowledge and what effect does it have on your pictures?

The first thing is: the bigger the hole, the more light that gets in.

Well, again, going back to the model of your eye – when you want to take pictures in dark or dim light settings, you’ll want to increase the aperture size to let in more light. This means (remember: the smaller the number, the bigger the hole) you’ll need to choose an AV number of 4, 3, 2 or 1 or even go negative to -1 (yes, minus 1)! The corresponding f/stop values are f/4, f/2.8, f/2, f/1.4, f/1 and f/0.7. (You might notice that the f/stop numbers are more confusing but you can see a pattern of doubling/halving: 4, 2, 1 interspersed by a second similar pattern: 2.8, 1.4, 0.7. Don’t worry about what the numbers mean, just remember: the smaller the number, the bigger the hole.)

Conversely, in a brightly lit environment or on a sunny day you might want to reduce the amount of light entering your camera so reduce the aperture size by increasing the AV number to 8, 10 or 12, or f/stop of f/16, f/32, f/64.

The exact range of AV numbers or f/stops available to you will depend on the lens that you’re using with your camera and as you get towards the extreme ends of the range in either direction you’re more likely to need a specialist lens.

It can be a bit difficult to get these concepts without the use of pictures so, I came across a great Squidoo lens on Digital Photography Tips by Sally Header, that gives a good explanation of these ideas together with some really helpful pictures and photographs you might want to look at.

The second important thing about aperture is: the bigger the hole, the less you have in sharp focus.

This brings us on to the concept of Depth of Field.

The depth of field relates to how much of your scene is actually in focus at any one time.

with a digital SLR camera you can choose to focus anywhere. On a particular object of interest, in the foreground (close to you), in the midground or in the distance. If you imagine the scene as a solid object sliced as it goes away from you, with a digital SLR camera you can choose to have slice 1 in focus or slice 3 or only slice 9 or all the slices from one to nine… and you do this by adjusting your depth of field which is controlled by the size of the aperture. To put this simply, the bigger the hole, the less you have in focus.

If you want to learn how this affects your final image look for the next article in this series: Digital Photography Tips – Depth Of Field.

Here’s to many more successful photo shoots!!