Photography Tips for Aperture and Depth of Field

In today’s edition of photography 101 I am giving you my best photography tips for Aperture. Learning to shoot in manual is one of the keys to improving your photography.  As part of the exposure triangle, aperture is one of the key elements to to improve your photography

Photography Tips for Aperture and Depth of Field

Today I want to talk about Aperture and depth of field.

So, to start, I think the question is: What is aperture?

Basically, Aperture is the size of the opening of your lens.

But Webopedia defines it as : the unit of measurement that defines the size of the opening in the lens that can be adjusted to control the amount of light reaching the film or digital sensor

( graphic courtesy of the dailyphotography.com)

What makes aperture such an important aspect of our photography, is the ability of aperture to affect our Depth of Field. Depth of field is the amount of your photo that is actually in focus.

• A LARGE depth of field means that a large of amount of your photo will be in focus.  SO both the foreground and the background will be in focus.  You would get this with an aperture of say f/15.
• A SHALLOW depth of field means that only a small part of the photo will be in focus. And the rest will be blurry or have Bokeh. You might get this with a aperture of f/2.8.

Here are a few visual examples of Aperture/Depth of Field. All of these photos were taken with my Canon 50mm 1.4 Lens.  All at the same time, in the same light, same position.   All of these are SOOC, and only sharpened for Web.

Notice how the red door in the background is affected  by the aperture……..

Now go out and practice!