Trouble working out aperture and shutter

391615 · Oct 4, 2007

I'm interested in taking sporting images, but am unsure how I go about setting the shutter speed, and aperture.....I took some shots yesterday, but struggled to get some consistency with the shots. it was late afternoon, and I was facing toward the sun. what is the best aperture to select and shutter speed for those shots. I think I was using 350 and f5.6 for some reason my camera wouldn't let me go down to 4.5. If i tried to go to 500 the shot would be too dark.

Also when taking a shot in full sunlight what is the best method of shooting. Is it better to speed up the shutter, or decrease the aperture size.

Garbz · Oct 5, 2007

Shutter and aperture are not just some arbitary controls of the exposure, they each have a purpose too. By increasing and reducing the shutter speed you can control the motion. If you took it down to say 1/80th and panned along with someone running at a football game you'd get creative motion blur. Crank it up to 1/500th and pretty much everything will be frozen.

Aperture controls the depth of field. Up it to f/8 or f/11 and the entire field while not in focus should be easily recognisable. Set it to f/2.8 and you single out only the player.

It's your job to decide how to do this. It's not your camera that won't go down to f/4.5 it's the lens. I'm going to assume it's rated f/4.5-5.6 which means while zoomed in your widest aperture is f/5.6. If f/5.6 gives you too low of a shutter speed and it's as wide as you can go you will need to raise the ISO of the sensor, or spend some nasty money on lenses.

Beyond that, experiment and find out what suits your picture.

391615 · Oct 5, 2007

Thanks Garbz, I'm sort of understanding soem things. I'm going to buy a book today, and just do some trial and error shooting for now. I didn't think about aperture when I got my lens, just got the cheapest one, and I'm really only interested in sports photography.

391615 · Oct 6, 2007

Awesome, I got some good shots at the cricket today, I'll post them later, didn't even realise about the ISO I started playing around with it, and finally took some good shots.