When Finn the dog and I go walking I take my digital SLR camera. Someone once told me you would never take a good photograph with the camera sitting in its bag; so it gets slung around my neck.

I love the possibilities for mucking about with a digital SLR, but it took an age to absorb the basic manual controls and as much as I enjoyed taking photographs using the automatic function I knew I was missing out.

So, if like me you occasionally need a reminder of the basic controls, here are a few pieces of information you’ll want to get into the brain bank.

•     The camera uses light to expose the photograph onto a sensor/film.
•     The camera housing stops light getting to the sensor/ film.
•     The Aperture is the hole where the light from the big wide world gets into the camera.
•     The size of the aperture is denoted by F numbers. The bigger the aperture the smaller the F    number. (F2 is a bigger opening than F7- annoying to begin with but makes sense later.)
•     The Shutter (like a little door) controls the time the light is allowed to enter the camera (and to the sensor/film.)

The size of the aperture and the shutter speed are linked. Adjust one and you’ll need to adjust the other.  (These adjustments allow us to get all arty with focus points and blurry speed shots, but we can come back to that another time.)

Too big an aperture with the shutter open for too long will mean the camera takes a picture of the world’s light. The photo is white or ‘over exposed.’  Too little an aperture, or the shutter not open long enough before the camera or subject is moved then the photograph will be dark or blurry. It’s a balance. A little aperture needs longer shutter times and therefore a short shutter time (action shot) needs a bigger aperture.

I like to keep things simple, so this week I am setting my camera to the AV setting and using the jog dial to adjust the size of the aperture, turning the jog dial on my canon camera to the left I maximize the aperture. In the AV setting, the camera will sort out how the time side of things.

If you fancy taking your camera out of the bag I would love to see your favourite photographs. If you would like more in-depth information here is a helpful link to a great guy on Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/spyrosheniadi