Today was the beginning of our three day mini photo 101 camp.  As we are learning to take our camera’s off auto, we focused on Aperture Today.

The photos in this post were taken by students during the workshop today.

APERTURE:  The aperture of a lens is how wide the lenses opens when you take a photo and ranges from wide to narrow, and is measured in f/stops, such as f/4 (wide aperture) to f/22 (narrow aperture). AV

• The smaller the number, the wider the aperture, the more light is let in  and the smaller the depth of field.   So, for a portrait, you want the subject in focus but the background to be blurred.  You would use a low aperture.  I love a shallow depth of field so I shot a lot of my photos on the lowest aperture that I can.

• The opposite of this is true as well.  The narrower the aperture, the less light is let in, darkening your shots an resulting in a larger the depth of field.  While shooting landscapes or citys capes, you might want to have both the foreground and the background in focus.  For this you would want a high aperture value, f/16 or f/22 to get deep depth of field.

• We shot in  Aperture Priority mode today which allows you to take control of the aperture, leavingthe shutter speed and ISO to be controlled controlled by the camera.   We practiced adjusting the amount of light entering into the camera through the lens and setting our depth of field.

Tomorrow we will explore shutter speed.