2005. I had never used a digital camera at night before. I was familiar with film cameras, and I understood shutter speed and aperture because those were the two main things I could control on my 35mm SLR.
Let me explain.
Shutter speed is basically how long the shutter stays open. The longer it’s open, the more light the camera lets in. That helps when you’re taking pictures in the dark, but there’s a catch: the camera records everything that moves while the shutter is open.
You could photograph a basketball player in a dark gym, for example, and let in enough light for a proper exposure, but the player might be nothing more than a blur.
Then there’s aperture.
A camera lens has an iris made from overlapping metal blades. It opens and closes to control how much light comes through the lens, kind of like the pupil of your eye. Opening it wider lets in more light, which means you can use a faster shutter speed and have a better chance of freezing whatever is moving.
But aperture has its own catch: depth of field. The wider the aperture, the smaller the area that appears in focus. That’s great when you want to isolate one thing and let everything else fall away into a blur. It’s not so great when you want an entire scene to be sharp, with no motion blur, in very little light.
I was still very much a beginner with digital photography. I couldn’t even get the lens to focus where I wanted it to. I must have taken 30 photographs of this composition, and these are the only two that came out any good.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned changing the camera’s ISO setting could help, too.
With film, the ISO was determined by the roll you put in the camera. With digital, you can change it from one photograph to the next. Raising the ISO helps you photograph in lower light, although the tradeoff is more grain or noise in the image.
Of course, I knew none of that yet. But you gotta start somewhere, right?
September 26, 2026