Understanding Lens Aperture
Next up on our camera lens journey is a brief chat about aperture.
When you choose a lens, you’re selecting it for it’s focal length and for it’s aperture. We talked about lens choices before and focused on focal length.
I love a lens that has a wide aperture range. The lower I set the aperture, the wider the lens opens and the smaller the range of focus is. If you like your subject to be in focus and the background to be blurry, you’ll want a lens that can open wide. The lower the aperture number, the wider your lens can open.
Aperture refers to the opening of light through a lens diaphragm. It is measured in f/stops. The lower the f-stop, the wider the diaphragm opens. So, an f/1.4 aperture is very wide and allows a lot of light in. A f/22 aperture is very narrow and allow less light in.
As noted above, aperture doesn’t only indicate how much light an image will have, it also determines how much of a scene will be in focus.
If you want to have a short depth of field with lots of blur in the background, you’ll want to use a lower aperture. You may have to speed up your camera’s shutter speed so that you don’t end up with an over-exposed image if you’re shooting in bright light. Think of a garden detail shot of some dew on a flower and a blurry-dreamy background.
When we’re looking at flat lay work or Dutch Still life-inspired work, we may be working in a shaded or dimly lit studio space with only natural light. In this case, we want to find an aperture setting that will allow for enough light, but also allow us to keep all of our subjects in focus.
These photos are special because of their detail. You want everything to be in focus, so you’ll want to keep your aperture closed down as much as possible. I like a setting of about 5.6 for flat lay work in my studio where the light is natural light streaming in from the door. Because we’re allowing less light in, we will need to adjust our camera speed and use a slower speed and a tripod so that we don’t cause a motion blur when we take our images.
Note: Sometimes you can find lenses of equal focal length that are available with different apertures. The lens that has a wider aperture range will cost more, because it allows you greater flexibility.
I‘ll touch base again with you and share some information about light balance, ISO, and shutter speeds. There is so much to learn and tinker with when you practice photography. I hope you’re enjoying this series, and if you’re not quite ready to explore manual photography yet- know that these resources will be here when you’re ready! And of course, if you shoot on automatic settings, your camera will me