Aperture Study

There are three basic parts to taking a picture on a manual camera - aperture, shutter, and ISO. I'm going to focus on aperture for this post.

One of the most basic things that a photographer needs to understand is how to control light entering the lens. It affects so many different aspects of the photo and can ultimately make or break the picture. The feature of the camera that is used to control this is the aperture.

The aperture is a variable disk in the lens that opens or closes to allow light to enter the body of the camera. The larger the opening the more light etc. However, that opening also affects the focal length of the shot too. The larger the opening the less in focus you have. You can see in the lamp shot that the lamp is in focus but the paintings on the wall behind it are not. I had to open the aperture the whole way to let in enough light in without compromising my shutter speed.

The picture to the right of the cathedral is another low light situation where I didn't want to augment with flash (because flashes in church are generally frowned upon - especially when folks are praying up at the front). To accomplish this and still get the focus to be what I wanted I had to close up the aperture (to get more focal range) but decrease the shutter speed to still let in enough light. But with the decreased shutter speed (almost 1.5 seconds) I couldn't hand hold this image. Instead I plopped the camera on the guest book pedestal:)


With the pic on the left of me and the dog you can really see the effect of the focal length difference generated by the aperture. This is shot at f4.0 which means the aperture is almost wide open on this lens. This image however was augmented by our speedlight flash because even with the apeture wide open we still didn't have enough light to hand hold the camera (and who's going to set up a tripod in the living room for a casual picutre like that right?)

Like how the dog's head just hangs? That's her favorite position on the couch for some reason. Come to think of it, we find her with her head cocked back like that lot...hmmm....