the 3 basics of a camera

Okay so as you probably know from one of my other posts, I like to take pictures.  This is not unusual for girls who blog, they take pictures and post them to there blogs, it's a popular topic.  However when I post my pictures I don't want you to just see them I want you to be able to recreate them so I will, like in the last post, tell you my camera settings for most of the pictures I post.  Now this won't really help you all that much unless you know what these settings mean.  So in the next 3 posts I will tell you about the 3 main things you need to focus on when you take a picture.
1) Aperture:
In simple terms: the thingy in the camera that determines what is in focus and what is blurry
In the camera: when reading camera books sometimes to aperture will be called the f/stop but it's the same thing
what it does specifically: It determines how much light can reach the "film" inside that camera,  it also determines how much of the picture is focused and how much is blurry.
How to use it: the lower the f/stop number the less that is in focus and vice versa.  So if you want a picture where only one small part of the picture is in focus use and f/stop of 4.5.  If you want a picture that has a lot in focus then use and f/stop of 16.  Now if you want a lot in focus the shutter speed (covered below) will go down making the picture blurry if it's too dark.
Example: 
this first picture is taken with an f/stop of f16

see everything is in focus?

and this one was taken with and f/stop of f4.5

















see the blurry parts?