I took a bunch of shots of my MB...some shots of my mom's garden lol.
This week I am gonna go down to the abandoned amusement park two towns away. Get some pics of the homeless people sleeping in their cars against the stark landscape...get my MB against the stark landscape. The park has a real weird dreary look to it. A nicely shined MB against a horrible dreaey old amusement park would be a cool contrast
My aperture has usually been 2.4....I've relied highly on the built in light meter to adjust my aperture. My clarity seems to be good though.
I've been able to make the foreground clear and crisp, and the background blurry by using my father's plethora of lenses, and different focus settings.
Next, to the abandoned amusement park, and when I get good, the delapadated once booming 1950's waterfront community nearby. I like the contrasts of beauty with dreariness. I really enjoy photos of abandoned places.
The photos of Pripyat (town nearby Chernobyl) frozen in 1986 always struck me in a really weird way. Not sad, not happy. Just weird.

Those aperture openings are called " F stops"...
The max opening which a camera can have is determined by the lens ... which are marked as to their ' speed'
1 would be a lens which did not interfere with catching light...
1.2 is very fast
1.4 is a little slower

THis max is determined by many things.. like the clarity of the glass, the number of glass lenses in the lens, the types of coatings... etc...

Each F stop opening lets in twice the light as the next smaller one.
Each speed available on the camera is twice / half the ones which next to it on the dial...

So, you can move up one F stop and down one speed and you should be keeping the same brightness in the picture... but you will be changing the things which have been mentioned above, like depth of field...

My speed is currently set at 250...1 click over from what the manual recommends for flash photography.

From my limited understanding..as long as subject is not moving, speed really doesn't make a big difference?

Kyle, with normal speed films the 1/250 will probably be all you need....( unless that subject is about to leave ,LOL )

The speed comes into play with slow films for instance... I used nothing but Kodachrome 2 for many years... my Nikon has never had anything different in it.. for 2000 plus pictures...

It (K2) used to have an ASA of 25.... so I had to use longer amounts of time to get enough light .....

The trick is that at about 1/30 second you have a problem holding the camera still enough....for sure anything longer than that you want a tripod or be braced against something.. ( or use the timer button and set the camera on something )

Other than that... what changes is still the depth of field when you change from one F stop to another.... assuming you have the film speed to compensate for the combos....