Know How To Choose The Right Aperture For Your Photos

aperture is one of the fundamentals in photography and knowing how to employ it properly which aperture to choose is one of the keys to growing as a photographer how's it how's it today i'm going to help you choose the right aperture for your creative photographs to take the mystery out of all these f-stops and closing down and opening up and all that stuff that sometimes gives aperture a scary aspect aperture is one of the pillars of photography along with iso and shutter speed and out of the three of them i think apertures are the most misunderstood probably because there's a lot of maths behind the numbers and they can be quite confusing and the concepts can be all a bit all over the place especially for a new photographer so i thought rather than bombard you with numbers today we're going to look at the apertures from wide open to stopped down and everything in between and the effects that you can get from harnessing different ranges of apertures across the field we're going to start wide open now if you're not familiar with what the wide open means it means when the the lens that you have is set to its widest possible aperture so it's letting in as much light as possible and this is represented by the small numbers so at the extreme end of this is the f 0.95 the f 1.0 and what have you don't worry too much about what these f-stop numbers actually mean just know as a rule of thumb that the smaller the number the larger the aperture and the bigger the number the smaller the aperture good you got it right okay so moving on so yes at this wide open extreme end those apertures are giving an extremely razor thin depth of field personally i think it's too much but if this is the effect that you are looking for where only the eyes are in focus or only one tiny little element of the the photograph is unfocused everything else is in this completely blurred background which is called voca by the way which is a japanese term which is strange i've only actually came into western photography lexicon in in the late 1990s which will explain why i've never heard of it when i was when i was younger anyway so if you're looking for those this is where you want to be having a lens that is as wide open as you possibly can get the the smallest number which is called of course the maximum aperture just to confuse you even more if i wanted to draw somebody's attention just to the face of the person who was sitting for me then i would use an aperture say around about sort of 1.8 f2 2.8 somewhere in that region to start giving me a enough depth of field to keep the tip of the nose through the eyes and through to the ears in focus so that looks a little bit more natural if you are photographing a something you know an element in a landscape then you may want to choose this kind of aperture where you are really drawing the attention to the the thing itself rather than having it in context or in an environment or giving us all of the image in terms of sharpness and in focusness right then that's kind of where you would start using these elements now a little caveat that these ranges and how much depth of field you get it does all they all change depending on what kind of lens you use how far you're from the subject how close you are to the subject and that's a bit out of the scope for this particular video because it's very mathematical and it's very it can get very boring very quickly so suffice to say this is a introduction to what the f-stops themselves are doing as a broad picture as we move on and stop down the lens a little bit more we're getting into those f4s f5.6s that are kind of the the forgotten people of photography the forgotten f-stops let's call them that right because they tend to be not one or the other they're not extreme depth of field so you're not having like maximum sharpness from front to back and they're not really giving you that separation that you get with the wider apertures those apertures you know the f 1.8 and what have you so a lot of people don't think they're particularly sexy and i would actually say as i've gotten older that the in the in the intrigue that can lie within this little range of of apertures f4 5.6 and f8 to a degree is that you can still start isolating the subject but in a more natural way in a way that gives the viewer some context of what is going on around the subject and its environment what what's happening in the background so if you look at something like fan ho for example very busy very chaotic hong kong street scenes now obviously he's using light as well here to really you know bring the whole scene together but if he was choosing to photograph in a very shallow depth of field then we would lose all that background context we wouldn't really know what's going on so if you are a street photographer or someone who enjoys photographing on the street or in busy environments then this actually might be a good range to start at to see how it can work for you now if you'd like to see for yourself how the lenses that you have at your disposal are working in regards to apertures and what effects they give you set your camera to aperture priority so that's turning it to av on the settings and what will happen is you can then photograph the same subject and let the camera worry about the the shutter speeds and what have you and see what happens when you photograph it wide open so the maximum aperture that your lens can offer you and then go all the way stop down stop stop down down stamp down until you get to f22 f16 whatever the the smallest aperture it is that your lens has and see the effects i've done this myself and these are the pictures that are going up on the screen right now just to give you an idea because aperture is one of those fundamentals that is going to help you grow as a photographer it is really helpful i can't stress this enough it is so helpful that you know how the image will look almost without thinking because you are mastering the use of aperture that that aperture becomes second nature to you so it is worth you invest in your time just to get a feel for it even if it if it's guess it scares you i don't know why an aperture would scare you but if an aperture scares you if the math behind it scares you don't worry about the maths just think about the effect so we've this is that was the rar for the those middle of the road guys and then we move into you know f8 and these again are slightly overlooked but they have more of a place in things like group photographs where you need a bit more of a depth of field to include you know all the people in the bridal party or everybody at that you know that retreat for the for the corporate team building session the f-11s f-16s they're not airplanes right they are little really kind of also slightly overlooked f-stops that play quite a role in more traditional portrait photography where you are looking to have the whole family group in or you're looking for a really good set of detail collection of detail within it because as you stop a lens down one of the benefits of of you stopping it down is the lens actually becomes sharper so if you are obsessed with pixel peeping and maximum sharpness then you really want to be photographing in this range going extreme to f 22 is is not going to help for a variety of very dull reasons so if you're looking for maximum surfaces this is where you're at in a landscape context or a street photography context this might be when you are starting to i think you know compress things in because you are especially on say street scenes the photographers from the the 1960s and 1970s did a lot of this kind of work where a long strip morley kind of suburban street is is photographed at at this kind of aperture this is f-11 this f-16 where it doesn't stretch on to infinity with with sharpness all the way through but it is compressing the image so we are bombarded with what seems an actual quite a flat photograph and and it creates a fairly bizarre almost two-dimensional feel to it which is something very different when you start thinking about wider landscapes in a you know in a broad sort of all sebastian salgado epic kind of way where the the f-stop is probably set to it's it's you know it's tiniest setting and tightness isn't the the technical word but it makes sense especially if you're not um you know not familiar with the f-stops that's when the the aperture is as small as it will possibly go so it is letting through as little light as it as as it possibly can but that light is jet like a little laser beams through which is why you get all this this sharpness coming through as opposed to when it's wide open and there's loads of light coming through that light just is scattering all over the place which is why we only have a very shallow depth of field what we're doing here is you're with that maximum depth of field you are allowing the eye to wander you're allowing the eye to walk through the image to explore it at its leisure because everything is in focus and this is so similar to the way that we actually see the world we see the world whenever we look at things unless we have a problem with our eyesight like some of us otherwise not actually bad things are in focus when we look at them sure sometimes you know if i look at the camera now and my hand is sort of a blur but that's an artificial thing where it's very close to me but everything i look at tends to be in focus and so when we're confronted with a large epic sweeping landscape then we want our viewer to be able to explore it to find things that interest them and have those things in focus it would look very weird if these epic landscapes were shot like like you know f2 or something like that with that shallow depth of field because it would just it wouldn't feel natural now of course if you wanted to create a completely unnatural feel you can change all of these things and this is the beauty of this explanation of f-stops and apertures and demystifying it is that now that you've got a bit of an idea a bit of a better handle on how these f-stops all work and what effects they are giving you as you stop down the lens as you open it up as you change your f-stop from f 2.8 to f 22 that you can then play with expectations the beauty of photography is that you are free to experiment try things out see what sticks see what doesn't work film well film doesn't cost because you haven't got film you're most likely shooting on on digital if you are shooting on digital and or film and you're mindful of you know oh what happens if i'm wasting my frames did you know that a lot of cameras actually have a depth of field preview button somewhere right you just press it and it will stop down the lens for you so that you can see what it looks like sure the viewfinder is going to get darker but that's you know the the whole sort of thing so enjoy aperture and if you are looking to expand onto another pillar of photography all right then motion blur is your next stop and this video is your best bet into getting to grips with motion blur thanks ever so much i'll see you soon

Channel: The Photographic Eye

Views: 222,129

Keywords: Photography, photography education, photography ideas, photographer, photography for beginners, photography tips, photography course, learn photography, landscape photography, aperture, choosing the best aperture, aperture in lens, aperture photography explained, aperture photography for beginners, aperture photography examples, using aperture in photography, how to choose the best aperture, what is aperture in photography, aperture explained

Id: ZF8d0KqwnSw

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022