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Aperture Does What?

Posted by on April 29, 2012

How many of you out there know what Aperture means when it comes to photography?  How many of you know that you have a function on your camera where you have the ability to control the aperture setting?

Aperture for those that don’t know in the simplest terms possible means the size of the opening of the lens when a picture is taken.  (www.digital-photography-school.com).

This excerpt taken from www.digital-photography-school.com/aperture: 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.

If you have heard the term of f-stops, this is in relation to aperture.  The lower the f-stop number means the larger the aperture in the photo is.  It also means larger the aperture the more light that is coming in.  And vice versa.  The higher the f-stop number means the less light that is coming through to the image.

Depth of Field: In the world of photography you may often hear the term of Depth of Field.  Wikipedia defines it as:  the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image.  The larger depth of field there is the more focus your entire shot will be.  The smaller the depth of field is means only a small part of your shot will be in focus.

The aperture has a big effect on depth of field.  Large aperture (the smaller the f-stop) decreases the depth of field in photos, and small aperture (larger f-stops) will give you a larger depth of field, and helps keeping your entire picture in focus.

Below you will find some examples that can help show you what changing your aperture can do:

This is an example of utilizing a larger aperture (f 2.8).  As you notice the focus of the flower is perfectly focus, but the background is blurred.  With this large of an aperture, even if another flower showed up behind this yellow one, that second flower wouldn’t be nearly as in focus as the yellow flower because of the small depth of field.

Whereas, in this photo:

The aperture is set at f 4.5.  Yes, the background is still a bit blurred, but you can make out the features of the background whereas the picture above you can really just see the colors.

I know this may come out to be pretty confusing, but it really is a lot of fun to go out and play with aperture.  A good time to use a large aperture (f 2.8, 4.5, etc) is with the use of portrait photography.  You put the person in the forefront where they come into focus nicely, and then the background gets blurred out.  It can make for some really great photos!

Also, if there’s ever a fine detail you want your camera to truly focus upon, it’d be a good idea to play around with the aperture to see what you can come up with.

Playing around with the aperture can make for some pretty great photos, and allows the use of creativity by bringing it to an entirely new level.

I hope you enjoyed this segment on aperture.  No worries, it can be a bit confusing, but I hope this helped in explaining more in detail what aperture is and what it can do for your photos!

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