Basic photography: understanding Aperture

“How can I get that kind of shot? It looks really nice.”

I’ve got that question a lot from relatives and friends who just started photography. And I assume they’re getting DSLR means they want to, at least, get better pics than from a compact camera. But on DSLR, one is required to know how it works in order to shoot properly.

There are terms like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, white balance, and some other stuffs that will scare point-and-snap amateurs away. But for the first one, I’ll start with aperture.

So, here’s an explanation of what aperture is. It is actually an opening of lens. If lens is a human eye, aperture is the iris. Its opening control how much light goes into the retina or the image sensor.

Of course, the wider it open, the more light it absorbs. Let’s take a look at the sample below.

As you may have noticed, the smaller the number, the wider it opens. Thus, smaller number means brighter pics.

Aperture setting is also tied to something called Depth of Field (DoF). Larger opening means shallow DoF. You can usually find this is in portrait shots or macro shots. Shallow DoF is used to isolate subject from the background as illustrated below.

To put sharp focus in both subject and background, you can set the aperture to narrow opening. This is called deep DoF as illustrated below.

This is my first series for tutorial of basic photography. Stay tuned for more tutorials.

Tags: aperture, basic, photography, pixel