How To Use Aperture

Posted by Georgy | 5/26/2013

By Luke Walker


If you're a newbie photographer, there's a good chance that you don't have a comprehensive understanding that enables you to know how to define aperture (as well as a few other things, which we will get to later). Here I want to explain to you exactly what aperture is and how to use it.

Simply put, aperture is your camera lens opening and closing. Pretend you are in a dark place taking photos. If you are using a small aperture, very little light will come in. So you need to allow more light to reach your camera's sensor by opening the aperture.

You have to know about the numerical values of F stop. This denotes the slice of of aperture. The smaller the F number, the lens will be wider. To allow more light to come in, we should use a smaller F stop number. With larger F stop numbers such as F stop 2, the aperture will be big.There is an directly unproportional link between aperture and the F stop number.

By selecting various F stop values, it is possible to create different effects, such as a blurred background in a portrait, or a landscape image where everything in the frame is in focus. With an aperture of F2, the lens is wide open. Some lenses can go down to F1.4 and allow lots of light in, which can be perfect if it's dark.

With a larger F number the size of the opening decreases. The bigger the number, the smaller the opening and smaller numbers mean larger openings.

To adjust this on your camera, change the dial on the top left to A or AV. This means the camera is in Aperture mode. This is semi-automatic, meaning you choose the F stop number and your camera will calculate the ISO value and shutter speed by itself.

If you can afford them, prime lenses which can go as low as F1.4 can really be worth the extra money, especially for portrait work.

If you want to have blurred backgrounds, you should use lower F numbers (like 2.8 for example). As you move up to F 4.5 or F 9, you will see the background details becoming crisper. Such backgrounds can also take attention away from the main focal point of the shot, so with portrait pictures you would probably be best off choosing lower F numbers. For landscapes, groups of people and so forth, it is best to choose bigger F stop values.

Your camera should be set on auto focus single (not auto focus auto) otherwise the camera will decide what it should focus on, which is not what we want in this situation.

Thank you for reading this article. You should understand how to define aperture going forward, as well as how to use it when taking your photos.




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