If you use a DSLR only for taking family snapshots and holiday pics you’re missing out on its enormous power.

Early on, if I wanted to be creative with my film camera I had to juggle lens choice, lens aperture, shutter speed and even use filters to achieve that ‘out-of-the ordinary’ shot. Then I had to wait for the trannies or prints to come back from the lab!

A digital SLR gives you instant results. So get creative!

Possibly the first step in this process is to learn how to juggle lens apertures and shutter speeds — the ‘steering wheel and gears’ of a camera — and understand their effect on the picture.

Lens apertures have numbers: a lens set to f2.8 will capture a large quantity of light; an aperture of f16 admits far less light. The former will give less depth of field; the latter delivers great depth of field. If you’re confused, just remember that the relationship between aperture and light seems counterintuitive: small numbers means more light and less depth of field; big numbers mean less light and greater depth of field.

Next stop, shutter speed. A slow shutter speed of, say, one-second is OK for stationary subjects, such as landscapes and still lifes — but pop your camera on a tripod. A 1/1000 second shutter speed is ideal for capturing blur-free images of fast moving subjects, such as speed boats, cars, horse races and people taking part in sporting events.

A lens aperture of f2.8, matched to a shutter speed of 1/1000 second will capture the same amount of light as a lens aperture of f16, coupled to a shutter speed of 1/16 second. In other words, f2.8 admits approximately 64 times the amount of light that f16 does.

Use a larger aperture, though, and you face the challenge of needing to perform more accurate focusing, due to the lens now possessing less depth of field. To retain accurate exposure you must adjust the shutter speed to match. However, on occasions you may want to overexpose, to create a lighter effect in your photo, maybe to lighten a face and its shadows. Conversely, you might want to deepen the shadows in a picture, to lose detail in the shadows for dramatic effect: if so, underexpose the shot.

If you want to use a larger aperture and a faster shutter speed you have to raise the ISO setting … a bit like the way you used to load a faster speed film.

You can’t use a small lens aperture (like f16 or smaller), fast shutter speed (like 1/1000 or faster) and a low ISO setting (like 50 or 100) if you want to shoot a black cat in a dark room. On the other hand, you can’t use a larger lens aperture (like f2.8), slow shutter speed (one second or slower) and high ISO setting (ISO 1600 or more) if you want to white car on the beach in full sunlight.

Once you understand this relationship between larger or smaller lens apertures, different shutter speeds and the effect of varying the ISO setting, you’re well on the way to becoming a creative photographer.

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