When it comes to taking pictures or making videos, what we’re basically doing is capturing light. And there are three things you can use to manipulate the amount of light that the sensor captures. This is known as the exposure triangle.
Aperture - the amount of opening the lens has,
Shutter Speed - How long the shutter stays open,
ISO - The sensitivity of the sensor.
These three settings make the exposure triangle. As the name suggests, even though they are independent settings, they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. As for how well you understand this will be reflected by how well you understand photography or videography.
Changing these settings doesn’t only affect the amount of light but also the nature of light that enters the camera. This, we can refer to as the side effects of these individual settings.
First let’s talk about Aperture.
Aperture :
So, Aperture is the amount of opening the lens has and you can change how big or small the opening is, with the settings on your camera. And this amount, is calculated using something called as F-stops. F-Stops are a mathematical representation of how much opening a lens has.
So as you can see in the above image. The F-stops are ranging from f/32 to f/1.4.
And if you can also see, the opening of the lens is inversely proportional to this number.
In simpler words, f/32 has the smallest opening and f/1.4 has the largest opening.
If you still can’t understand this, let’s do some math.
We are supposed to take the reciprocal of the f-stop number and multiply it with 100 to get the percentage of opening the lens has.
I hope this table helps you understand how these f-stop numbers directly impact how much of the lens is open. As I said, this change in the opening not just affects how much light enters but also it has some effects on the nature of the image captured.
Depth of field :
Take a look at the images above the apertures. You can see that there’s a gradual difference in the amount of image that’s in focus.
With a smaller aperture like f/32 to f/11, most of the image is in focus.
But with a larger aperture like f/1.4 or f/2, only some of the image is in focus in this example, only the person is in focus and the background is blurred.
And that’s exactly how aperture affects the depth of field of an image. In simpler terms,
depth of field is basically how much of the image is in focus and how much is blurred.
Here are some images to help you understand how depth of field works in parallel with aperture.
And this difference in depth of field is something we can use to our advantage to manipulate the image the way we want it. For example, if you’re shooting Portraits or Something cinematic, You would want a lot of background blur, aka, bokeh but when you’re shooting landscapes or Real estate or even events, you wouldn’t want a lot of blur and you would want most of the things if not everything to be in focus.
So it depends on how we want the image to be and having an understanding of how the aperture works will help us create the image that we have in mind. Hopefully this article was helpful in making you understand how aperture works. See you in the next one, where we dive deeper into shutter speed. Until then, Try shooting pictures with different aperture settings and see how it changes the exposure as well as the depth of field.
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