Ok, so you’ve now bought your new baby, a brand spanking new DSLR, so how to do you start taking those gorgeous photos that you see online and in galleries?

Well, first of all it doesn’t come easily, as with all things- practice makes perfect.

First, I do want you to note that I am not a professional in that I do this for a living. I am also an amateur, like a lot of you guys out there and I just want to explore my hobby and share it with others.

Now, so the first thing I noticed was just the sheer amount of options that was just available for me. How to tackle it? It was just overwhelming and what did all the buttons and options on the camera do?! So, the first thing of course is always the automatic mode. Since I have the standard kit lens, I start playing around with that. Even though it came out really crisp, I didn’t like that the photos were very generic- the kind of photos that I could have taken with my point and shoot camera.

Then instead of A (Automatic), I switched the lens mode to M (Manual) so that I could control more of the lens and since I took a photography course back in high school where I learned how to use a manual SLR and use a dark room to produce photos, I really liked the control it offered me.

Then I started to play around with Aperture openings. If you guys are confused about this, heres an excerpt from my favorite online photography site, Digital Photography School:

Aperture is ‘the size of the opening in the lens when a picture is taken.’When you hit the shutter release button of your camera a hole opens up that allows your cameras image sensor to catch a glimpse of the scene you’re wanting to capture. The aperture that you set impacts the size of that hole. The larger the hole the more light that gets in – the smaller the hole the less light.

Aperture is measured in ‘f-stops’. You’ll often see them referred to here at Digital Photography School as f/number – for example f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6,f/8,f/22 etc. Moving from one f-stop to the next doubles or halves the size of the amount of opening in your lens (and the amount of light getting through). Keep in mind that a change in shutter speed from one stop to the next doubles or halves the amount of light that gets in also – this means if you increase one and decrease the other you let the same amount of light in – very handy to keep in mind).

One thing that causes a lot of new photographers confusion is that large apertures (where lots of light gets through) are given f/stop smaller numbers and smaller apertures (where less light gets through) have larger f-stop numbers. So f/2.8 is in fact a much larger aperture than f/22. It seems the wrong way around when you first hear it but you’ll get the hang of it.
Read more: http://digital-photography-school.com/aperture#ixzz0dk7UNIqN

That’s where I hit the mark. So the general rule is the smaller the f-value (bigger the aperture opening). I loved the effect of the blurry backgrounds in my photographs.

So here’s an example of a photo I took. One with a small aperture:

And the same photo with a big aperture:

So how to you adjust your aperture value?

First twist your dial (doesn’t matter what model DSLR you have, it should have this type of a dial. Twist to Aperture priority labeled (A) and numbered “1″ in the diagram above. Then adjust your F-stop value with the twisty knob next to the AE-L/AF-L to the left or the right to get increasing or decreasing aperture values. Look at your screen or through the viewfinder and see what the f-stop value is currently at. The bigger the aperture, the blurrier the background if your objects are of different distances from one another.

Hope this helps!