Aperture Re-visted

I decided I would re-visit aperture, when we first looked at this Dave explained why we use Aperture, the effects this has and how you can use this to achieve specific result.  For example when shooting landscapes you would use a small Aperture (Large F Stop) this would give you a wide depth of field with less "out of focus" capturing much more detail across the Landscape. 

On the other hand if you didn't want to capture the detail and had a focal point you wanted to enhance you would use a large Aperture (Small F Stop) which would then give you a shallow depth of field and more "out of focus" area in the image.


When looking at this the first time round I was getting very confused with how you talk about Aperture, i.e. if you are talking about a small hole using a large F stop do you call this a Large Aperture or Small?  I decided for me I find it easier to refer to Aperture by using the term F stops.


Whilst working on the colours theme a few weeks back I decided that would be a good time to play with F stops as I was playing around with pencil crayons and though they would be ideal to show the effects of the F Stops being able to show only a small area in focus and then the whole area in focus using a large F Stop. I have added two images below which I think show the effects brilliantly.

F/ 5.6

F/29

As you can see there is much more detail in focus on the second image where a much larger F Stop has been used and vise versa

As I will be shooting on a nature reserve for theme 1, Aperture will be considered quite a lot as I will be using large F Stops for the landscape shots and then using smaller F Stops (with a fast shutter) when capturing the birds on the reserve.

I found with Aperture the more you read about it, experiment with it and see visible difference's in the images the more it all fits into place.  I found this below when researching Aperture, its just one of the many results listed in google that will explain Aperture and help you to understand it.

1) What is Aperture?

Simply put, aperture is a hole within a lens, through which light travels into the camera body. It is easier to understand the concept if you just think about our eyes. Every camera that we know of today is designed like human eyes. The cornea in our eyes is like the front element of a lens – it gathers all external light, then bends it and passes it to the iris. Depending on the amount of light, the iris can either expand or shrink, controlling the size of the pupil, which is a hole that lets the light pass further into the eye. The pupil is essentially what we refer to as aperture in photography. The amount of light that enters the retina (which works just like the camera sensor), is limited to the size of the pupil – the larger the pupil, the more light enters the retina.
So, the easiest way to remember aperture, is by associating it with your pupil. Large pupil size equals large aperture, while small pupil size equals small aperture.

2) Size of Aperture – Large vs Small Aperture

The iris of the lens that controls the size (diameter) of the aperture is called “diaphragm” in optics. The sole purpose of the diaphragm is to block or stop all light, with the exception of the light that goes through the aperture. In photography, aperture is expressed in f-numbers (for example f/5.6). These f-numbers that are known as “f-stops” are a way of describing the size of the aperture, or how open or closed the aperture is. A smaller f-stop means a larger aperture, while a larger f-stop means a smaller aperture. Most people find this awkward, since we are used to having larger numbers represent larger values, but not in this case. For example, f/1.4 is larger than f/2.0 and much larger than f/8.0.
Take a look at this chart (image courtesy of Wikipedia):

The size of the circle represents the size of the lens aperture – the larger the f-number, the smaller the aperture.

3) What is Depth of Field?

One important thing to remember here, the size of the aperture has a direct impact on the depth of field, which is the area of the image that appears sharp. A large f-number such as f/32, (which means a smaller aperture) will bring all foreground and background objects in focus, while a small f-number such as f/1.4 will isolate the foreground from the background by making the foreground objects sharp and the background blurry.