Don't Eat Me

Photography is a highly refined and complex art, reserved only for the champions of the intelligence quotient and scholastic masters...ALL LIES! Perhaps you have often cradled your optical art maker in hand, longing to turn the mode dial from the "Auto" setting to that magnanimous M (manual), which has like a cliff of unexplored opportunity. Whilst you have walked along the auto trail, you may have wondered what was upon the manual precipice above, you still settled for the choices that your camera made for you as you took acceptable shots that took very little thought on your own part, except to point and shoot. Well, it is time for you to turn that dial to M. NO MORE shall you walk along the path of preset pictures. Think for yourself!
Enough soap boxing (what would a soap boxing match look like?). There are three things that a manual master need to know. They are ISO, Aperture, and Exposure. If you have read my other posts, which is fine if you haven't, you may have already heard about exposure a couple times in the long exposure shots. Since ISO is a tricky concept, I would like to focus on aperture. The aperture is much like the iris (or pupil) of your eye. It controls the amount of light that comes into your eye. If the aperture is opened up and made larger it will allow more light it. Therefore, like your eye, it is necessary to open up the aperture further when lighting decreases. Now, you may be trying this as you are reading and now be yelling "LIES!" back at me because as you make the aperture number bigger on your camera bigger, the photos get darker. The reason for this being that the aperture size is a ratio. Therefore, if the number is 5.6 it is a much bigger aperture than if the number is 20. If that is confusing think of it in more normal ratios. If the diameter of circle A was twice as big as circle B the ratio would be 1:2, in the case of aperture it would be 2. If circle A was four times smaller than circle B it would be a ratio of 1:4, or an aperture of 4. If that does not make sense play with it on your camera for a while and it that still leaves you befuddled please drop a question in the comments and I will do my best to answer it.
Now, there is more to aperture than what meets the eye. In addition to to regulating light coming into the lens , it also effects the depth of field in a shot. The physics behind this is sweet, but a bit tiring, so I will wait with trying to lay that out. However, know that the larger the aperture is, that being a smaller number displayed, the shorter the depth of field will be. The depth of field is the amount of the picture that is in focus. In "Don't Eat Me", shown above, a large aperture was used to get only the spider in focus and much of the rest of the shot blurred out. A short depth of field can be especially desirable in portrait photography as it decreases the number of distractions present. However, in landscape photography on would want a smaller aperture to increase the depth of field and get the entire vista in focus. Ansel Adams, a very famous photographer, was known for using tiny apertures for his landscapes, so feel free to type him in on google to find some good examples. Otherwise I have some landscapes on this blog as well.  That is enough for now, if you have any questions let me know.