This same technique can be seen at its most extreme with a telephoto lens shot wide-open, at f/2.0 or f/2.8 or on a miniaturized scale with macro photography. The farther something is from the subject you’ve focused on, the more it will fall out of focus.Ĭase in point, by opening the lens up all the way to f/1.8, I was able to better isolate this palm frond from the forest behind it: If you want to intentionally push the foreground or background out of focus you can use a large aperture. Once you get down to a very small aperture (like f/16, f/22 or f/32) you can keep the subject, foreground and background all in focus in one photograph. With each additional photograph, you will have more and more of the scene in focus. You can see how this works if you start out with a large aperture, and take a photo of a landscape, and then move down one f-stop and take another, and so on. If you’re taking a photo of a landscape, and you want both nearby and distant subjects to be in sharp focus, you will need to use a smaller aperture. When thinking about the aperture, ask yourself “how small or large?”ġ. This effect can be exploited to create striking photographs. With a DSLR or other 35mm-format cameras, mid- to large-sized apertures will create an image that is partially out of focus in certain situations. In bright daylight, outside, you’ll need to shoot at a smaller aperture, like f/16, but inside the building where its not nearly as bright, you’ll need to use a larger aperture, like f/4, to correctly expose the image.Ĭhanging the size of the aperture also has an effect on an image’s focus. Let’s say you decide to use the same shutter speed to take a picture indoors and outside. One easy example is the difference between inside and outside shooting. A scene with more light will require a smaller aperture (f/8 or f/16) and a scene with less light will require a larger aperture (f/3.6 or f/2.8). The aperture’s job is to restrict the amount of light passing through the lens, although unlike the shutter the aperture is always open. As its smallest aperture our example lens may have a setting like like f/16 or f/32. While it may seem counterintuitive at first, greater f-numbers refer to smaller apertures. Take a look at the three different aperture settings clearly visible within the lens of this old Rolleiflex camera, here:Įvery camera lens is manufactured with a label on the front, showing the widest possible aperture that lens can achieve, along with the focal length.įor example, many manufactures sell a “50mm f/1.8 lens.” This tells us that the focal length is 50mm, and the largest possible aperture is f/1.8. Unlike the shutter, the aperture is always at least partially open so light always enters to some extent. The metal blades are adjustable, which allows the diameter of the aperture/opening to be adjusted smaller or larger. The aperture is made up of several thin metal blades placed in a spiral pattern around an opening (the opening is where the light enters). I’ll talk about your camera’s ISO settings in another article, but today I want to explore the other main control that works alongside your shutter to create a properly exposed image-the lens aperture.Īnd just like the shutter, the aperture can also be used as a creative tool.įor lenses used with 35mm format cameras, like DSLRs and SLRs, the aperture sits inside the lens. In my previous article, I talked about the camera’s shutter, how it works, and what impact even a few fractions of a second’s difference can have on an image. By Zach McCabe in Art Tutorials > Photography Tips
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