Photography: What the heck is aperture?

And day two…

The day two topic for this little blog challenge that Jennie’s got going is: Educate us on something you know a lot about or are good at. Take any approach you'd like (serious and educational or funny and sarcastic)

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other then knowing how to really annoy my hubs, I’m really good at photography

here are a few tips from me to you

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The base foundation of photography is light. Without light, and understanding how a camera captures light you’ll never truly know how and while some pictures come out looking great and others don’t. There are three main components to how a camera captures light and forms an image… aperture | shutter speed | ISO

We’re just going to talk about aperture today. Aperture!!

Aperture is the size of the lens opening, and controls how much light is let into the camera. A large aperture means lots of light is being let in and a small aperture means very little light is being let in. Think of blinds on a window, when the blinds are wide open lots of light gets in, when you start shutting the blinds less and less light is let in. Same idea here.

Now the catch is … the smaller your aperture (f) stop is the wider your blinds are open. So an aperture of f1.4 is very large while an f10 is very small. More light is let in at an aperture of f1.4 and less is let in at f10.

Look on the photo above, f/1.4 is a really wide opened, the blinds are fully pulled back/  That means you'll get a LOT of light coming in there, because the blinds are opened as big as they can be (even though it's a small number, 1.4) it's a wide opening.

In contrast, f/16 is a small opening- the blinds are practically closed and light is peeking through a small opening, so very little light gets in there.

Make sense?!

Here is the cool part, aperture is what is used to control your depth of field. So when you get the photos where the object is in focus but everything is blurry it’s that aperture that is being changed.

In the image above, the aperture is switched from wide open to closed from left to right. 2.8 is wide open for a good number of fast lenses out there. You can see how the background comes into focus as the aperture is closed, and less light is allowed in.

 

Hope you all learned something new today!