APERTURE

Aperture is basically a hole in which light is admitted, in terms of cameras the aperture of an optical system is the opening that determines the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane.

Aperture refers to an adjustable opening in your camera lens that is able to limit the amount of light passing through the lens and hitting the camera sensor. Just think of it like your eyes. When you open your eyes, light enters through your cornea, and is bent through the pupil, which is a round opening in the center of the iris. The iris and pupil works exactly like the aperture of a camera, controlling the amount of light being emitted.

To control your camera’s aperture, switch your camera mode to aperture priority. In this mode, you are able to manually control your camera’s aperture. The camera will change the shutter speed automatically to match the aperture that you had selected to create a picture that is properly exposed when the shutter release button is clicked.

Aperture is measured in F-stops. The lower the F-stop (e.g. f/2.8), the wider the opening of the aperture. While the higher the F-stop (e.g. f/22), the smaller the opening of the aperture. This concept can be confusing for beginners to understand as it is counter intuitive. However, it should not be too hard to understand once we know exactly what aperture is and how it affects the outcome of your pictures.

When the aperture is wide open (e.g. f/2.8), more light will enter through the camera’s lens, therefore, less time is required for proper exposure which meant faster shutter speeds. Wide aperture will also cause a shallow depth of field in your picture, where the foreground and background of your picture is blurred except for the subject which you are focusing on. However, the opposite applies when the aperture is small.

A small aperture is also suitable to use when you want to take landscapes or group shots so that everything in the scene is considerably sharp.

Example: