What are all those weird numbers on my camera, anyway?

So you’ve gotten a fancy SLR camera and you want to take some pictures of your beloved pet? You don’t know what all of those numbers on those dials are? Fear not! I’ve got a basic overview for you!

F-Stop / Aperature – Yep, these two terms refer to the same thing! This refers to how much range of the space toward and away from you will be in focus, with lower F numbers being a smaller range in-focus and a wide range that will be blurry.

An f-stop of 1.4, for example, might ONLY show an animal’s eyes in focus and the rest of their face a bit blurry. An f-stop of 14 would have most objects within the frame looking sharp and in-focus.

What the number actually represents is how wide open that circle of blades is when you look into your lens. The lower the number is, the more open the aperture is. Think of the number as how much restriction is being put on the lens – so a f/1.4 is not very restricted, while a f/14 has a lot of the lens blocked out by those blades!

Because of the way it works, wide aperture/low f means more light comes into the camera at once. Independent of other settings, a photo taken at f/1.4 will be much brighter than the same photo taken at f/14.

Shutter Speed – This is the setting that looks like a fraction when you look at your camera settings. It might be 1/2, 1/4, or even 1/500. This is actually a lot simpler than it looks – the fraction refers to how much of a second the photo will need to take. A shutter speed of 1 takes one second.

For pet photos, you don’t want a shutter speed of 1 – pets move, and if you’re anything like me your hands are too unsteady to get a sharp photo at that speed anyway! I generally prefer to keep mine at around 1/100 at the slowest, and work up from there.

ISO – This is camera sensitivity, which is basically how much the camera can make up for low light. Higher settings for ISO mean you don’t have to have as much light, but the photo will have some “noise” – or a bit of a speckled effect. Very low ISO is around 100 – this will make for a very sharp photo but you’ll need very bright light in order to get anything to show up. High ISO can be around 1600 – this will allow you to take photos in some dim conditions, but you may see some speckle patterns in the end result!

I’d actually recommend making ISO your most flexible setting when doing pet photography. You don’t want your shutter speed too slow, and if you set your f-stop too low you may have trouble getting enough detail in focus, but the noise from ISO generally isn’t too big a deal.

Now that you know a bit of the basics about camera settings, get out there and take some cute photos of your pet!