An SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera, regardless digital or analogue always consists of its body and the lens as illustrated below.

Attaching the lens, simple…yet important.

The simple yet important point to remember is that whenever we want to attached a lens to the body, always align the body and the lens properly before twisting the lens to locking position. As illustrated above, the red marker showed the white line on the lens and the white circle on the body to be aligned.

This kind of marks are standard for different types of lenses, here’s another example:

Many times, we may be tempted to just twist the lens a whole 360 degree hoping to get to the right spot eventually. The problem is that twisting the lens before its properly align may damage the electronic contacts of the lens, as seen on this image: .

The lens

Lets take a look at a common kind of lens that we will come across, described in the photograph below.

The focusing ring will be used to adjust the lens based on the distance of the object that we are photographing. In the example above, the measurement comes in two metric, feet (ft) and meters (m). This control is very straightforward, if the image is not sharp, then it’s out of focus

The next ring below the focusing ring, is the focal ring; this ring controls the magnification of your object. I’m not going into the mathematical depth of focal length, basically the larger the number, the higher the magnification is. Focal length is commonly denoted using F character/

Below the focal ring is the aperture ring. The aperture ring controls how wide the lens opens up, or in other words how much light are allowed to go pass through the lens into the camera sensor (digital) or negative (analogue). Again we won’t get into the mathematical details. A practical rule of thumb is: “less is more”; the smaller the number, the wider you open up, the more light goes through the lens. For example: f/ 3.5 allows more light passing through then f/16. Aperture is denoted with f.

You may notice that some of the rings, in particular the aperture ring do not exist in some newer lenses, this is because the corresponding settings are controllable through the camera body.

Aperture’s involvement will be discussed more on the next section: Bite 3: Speed and aperture - the root of quality shots.