Photo Term Series Post #5: Aperture
“Aperture is a hole or an opening through which light is admitted or more specifically in photography how wide open the shutter remains when the shutter is released.” – Wikipedia
The ratio of the lens focal length to the effective aperture provides the f/stop value. (see Photo Term Series Post #6: f-stop, f/stop or f-number)
Technorati Tags: aperture, f-stop, f/stop, photography, term, photo, terminology
Leave a Comments »
Trackback | RSS 2.0
[...] In other words, the f-stop is the ratio of lens focal length to the effective aperture open diameter. Each f-stop step increment represents a doubling or halving of the lens aperture open area and thus the amount of light admitted into the lens [...]
[...] Note: Wide aperture (shallow DOF) is represented with a smaller f/stop while a smaller aperture (deep DOF) is represented with a larger f/stop. Bookmark to: [...]
[...] If you’re like me you saw this and thought “Great! A really dramatic landscape that came out well”. The problem is that this is a low resolution version of a much larger and more detailed image. Not unlike on my camera LCD screen I thought this came out when seeing it. After I got home and saw the large file I spent the remainder of my evening beating myself up for taking this photo with the wrong setting. You can barely make it out, but the foreground is in soft focus. The rocks should have a very sharp edge and unfortunately they’re soft. Tired from a long day I mixed up my settings, not capturing the scene with a greater depth of field via a smaller aperture setting. The result is a soft focused image in the foreground and a well focused image in the background… all because I chose an aperture of f4 and set my focus manually to infinite. If I were to do it again I’d have set an aperture of f22 and manually focused on the rocks mid-scene. I have numerous images of a similar nature taken else where using the correct settings so I’m frustrated with my lack of focus and poor execution. In that regard this may very well be my most beautiful bad photo of the year. [...]
[...] general tip to burn into your memory is focus 1/3 of the way into your photo with a smaller aperture setting to maximize your depth of [...]
[...] those using shorter focal length lenses is to focus 1/3 of the way into your photo with a smaller aperture setting to maximize your depth of [...]