1. Shutter Speed:

Shutter-speed is straight forward.. It is just the speed with which the shutter closes, or in other words, the amount of time the shutter is open is also called the shutter speed.. Shutter speed like 1/100 (normal) or even 1/3000(high speed, freezes motion) or even 2″(two seconds exposure, used to ‘capture’ motion).

2. Aperture

Aperture is the ‘size’ of the hole through which light enters the camera body and falls on the sensor(or reel). So, logically, the bigger this gets(F 1.4), more light comes in and the smaller it gets(F 32), the lesser light comes in. The Aperture is always the ‘inverse’ so F 1.4 (actually it is 1/1.4) is the widest aperture while F 32 (1/32) is the smallest aperture when the hole is really small. So if you shoot with a huge aperture like F 1.4, you’ll get brighter pictures and if you shoot at F 32, you’ll get darker pictures. Simple…

Point to Note:
The Inverse-Proportion Relation is simple.. one goes up, the other comes down.. If a high shutter speed is selected(1/1000th of a second), then the Aperture must be as large as possible (F 1.4) otherwise the picture will be underexposed, similarly, if a slower speed is selected (2″ seconds), then the Aperture must be as small as possible (F 32) otherwise the picture might be over-exposed… Note: All the talk is with reference to ordinary daylight shooting

So all that’s left for the photographer to do is to find that perfect balance between the shutter-speed and aperture. More than one combination can produce the exact result.. It’s all about your requirement.. say you want to capture a fast moment, you would go for a high speed and have to go for the highest aperture… say it is very sunny, you can go in for a small aperture with a lesser speed to balance the amount of light..

Is that all ? Apparently there is one more factor which comes in …. Stay tuned !

I’ll try to give a practical overview of the main three different types of cameras..

1. The Film Camera (The Past camera)
2. Point and Shoot (The Common man’s camera)
3. Digital Single Lens Reflective a.k.a SLR (The Stud camera)

Chances are you must have got to play with at least the first two. Heck, at least got to touch one of them!

The Film camera
The Film camera as we all know is like the Grand-Daddy of Cameras. It derives it’s name from the fact that it used to record on a film and you had to wash the film to take the prints on paper. This is also referred to as the standard 35mm. There were normal film-cameras (like the popular Kodak KB-10) and there were the film-SLR cameras (by Olympus, Leica, Konica, Minolta etc etc ..) This brand of cameras is well on its way to retirement now as it is much cheaper maintaining a digital camera than it is to maintain a Film.

The Point and Shoot camera
Now this is a camera which is the most common nowadays. Almost all of the Slim cameras in market today belong to this category. Oh yes, your phone cameras also fall in this category. These are the normal digital cameras and are produced by companies like Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic and so on. The list is practically endless. These are also not that costly to buy(from 2000 INR till about 17000 INR) and hence have easily integrated with the common man’s budget. Needless to say, advanced PS (Point and Shoot) cameras have many capabilities and are available at around 25000 INR.

Digital Single Lens Reflective a.k.a DSLR
This is the Big-Daddy of Cameras. The Elite Class, the powerful…
The most sought after camera from the amateur to the semi-professional to the professional is the DSLR. The Digital SLR offers a different architecture compared to the PS camera and is highly customizable… very highly customizable. The different players in this space are limited to Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony etc among a small set. Pricing of DSLR is obviously the costliest starting from 30,000 INR (Canon 1000D) to , well.. in lakhs of Rupees (Canon 1DS Mark III) and even higher! (the 50 megapixel Hasselblad Camera). Ahem, I forgot another point here. All of these prices are only for the Body and not for the Lenses. They come separately

But the point to note here is with a decent investment of around 80-90k INR(body+lenses+others), you can actually get PRO photos. Heck, I used to do it in 25k itself, but it’s time I also have to upgrade to a better machine. The cheapest you can start is around 30k. But hey ! 2nd hand is always a very good option in the DSLR world.

So, there you go. That was a crude, practical introduction to the different kinds of Cameras people use.

Links to
Film Camera on Wiki
Point and Shoot on Wiki
DSLR on Wiki
Flickr’s Camera stats

When Harshit asked me if I was interested in writing a small series of posts about something I really like from the bottom of my heart, I took sometime before I said yes.

I had my own questions about my abilities, but then sometimes it’s just dil-logical (straight from the heart).

In this series of posts starting shortly, I will try to cover many aspects of photography, starting from the basics to slightly more advanced topics. Most of them will be from my personal experiences and I may get in some posts from my fellow photographers in flickr.com.

The whole point of this series of posts will be to “promote photography” as an effective way to lead a happier life!

That’s right… we are after all happysing.com.