Photography Basics - Learning About Aperture

Aperture and other technical photography basics can induce yawns in the most eager of budding shutterbugs, but once these basics are understood, the rest of photography easily comes into focus. Aperture, shutter speed and ISO are all terms good to know, whether you have a point-and-shoot or professional camera. This article explains aperture and provides tips for using it to create better photographs.

To best understand aperture, consider how the irises of your eyes widen and narrow to allow more or less light into the pupil. Like your irises, the camera's lens diaphragm widens and narrows to let in more or less light. Thus the aperture determines the exposure of the picture, that is how bright or dark it is. The aperture also has another important purpose which we'll look at in a second.

"Aperture" is measured in F Stops and refers to the size of this opening. The smaller the F stop, the wider the aperture. This is why it can be confusing. Actually the F stop numbers are ratios, which is why the bigger the F Stop number, the smaller the size of the aperture.

The aperture also controls depth of field in addition to controlling light. To better understand this, make a fist and hold it in front of your eye. Now gradually open your hand. See how the focus changes? Sure you can see more through the bigger opening, but when the opening in your fist is small everything is in focus? Try it again and see how when you open your fist, the object closest to you will come into focus while objects further away will be fuzzy. This is how aperture determines depth of field, that is how much of a photograph is focused.

If you are shooting in Auto Focus (AF), the camera will attempt to focus on what it perceives to be the main subject of the photograph, but the results may not be what you want.

For this reason, many cameras have an Aperture Priority setting to help eliminate this problem. This allows you to set the aperture and then it automatically adjusts the shutter speed to compensate for the larger or smaller aperture. For example, if you set the aperture for a landscape, it narrows it and therefore lets in less light. The camera would then automatically increase the amount of time the shutter stays open so that your photo isn't underexposed or too dark. Aperture Priority isn't exact, but this is how it usually works.

Now if you have an SLR and are shooting in manual mode, you can adjust the aperture and shutter speeds separately.

Most will have a camera with preset modes such as landscape, sports or portrait. When the mode is set to landscape, the aperture automatically narrows to bring everything into focus. The shutter speed also automatically slows down so the shutter is open longer to offset the smaller amount of light coming in through the lens diaphragm.

When you use portrait mode and focus on a person in front of you, the camera will bring the person into focus but will make the background less focused to make the subject stand out from the background. It will also speed up the shutter speed to prevent the picture from being overexposed from the additional light allowed in with the larger aperture.

Remember: the smaller the aperture, the greater the F stop number (because it represents a ratio not a whole number) and the greater the depth of field.

It's important to learn about aperture if you want to learn how to use manual camera settings or Aperture Priority but also if you want to use preset camera modes. Here are three preset modes you should better understand:

* Portrait: How much the background blurs when using this mode depends on your camera and the distance between your subject and background - a minimum of 10 feet works best. This mode can be used for any subject you want to bring into focus while taking the background out of focus.

* Landscape:(also often called "infinity"): This is the mode depicted by the mountain peak or figure 8. You can use this setting for pictures where you want everything to be in focus like landscapes.

* Macro: This mode, depicted by the tulip, opens the camera's aperture extra wide so that you can take extreme closeups without the blur caused by not enough focus. Depending upon your camera, you should be able to get anywhere between an inch to a foot of your subject. When preparing to take photos outdoors of items like flowers, remember that even the smallest petal movement can cause the image to be blurry because of the slower shutter speed. Also remember to focus on the subject that you want in focus, whether it be a caterpillar's eyes or a butterfly's wings.

Just applying this knowledge can help you take some beautiful photos that you'll be proud to display in your home.


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Autumn Lockwood is a writer for Your Picture Frames and loves photography. Your Picture Frames makes it easy for you to find just the
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