Use Aperture With Your Camera
Blog entry
16th June
Aperture what is this all about?
This blog will explain what aperture means, how to use it, and why it is important when using your camera to take photographs.
What you will learn:
How to use aperture correctly and identify how this affects the camera settings
Be able to use aperture priority
What is aperture?
Put most – The aperture is ‘the opening in the lens.’
When you hit your camera's shutter release button, a hole opens up that allows your camera’s image sensor to catch a glimpse of the scene you’re capturing. The aperture you set impacts the size of that hole.
Tip - The larger the hole the more light that gets in – the smaller the hole the less light.
ACTIVITY 1
Let’s check how wide your aperture can go. Look at the back of your camera, where you can see the aperture.
Change the aperture until it will reduce in number size any lower than F5.6.
Your lens will show on the front-facing part of the lens or side what the aperture range is.
Understanding F-Stops
The form F-stop is the name for aperture and this is what it’s referred to when setting your aperture.
The important thing to note is that a large F-number. like F11, F14, or F22 and above, which means that you will have a smaller hole. Whereas the smaller the number, like F1.4, F2.0, or F2.8 will give you a larger opening.
So let’s remember that the aperture size relates to the amount of light that the camera lets into the camera each time the shutter release button opens and closes. So, if we are in a dark room, we will require more light, so you will need a larger aperture or wider aperture. If we are outside in the bright sunshine you will require less light and so the aperture can be smaller.
Learn to use Aperture Priority
How to use aperture priority is to set the camera in this mode by moving your mode dial on your camera. Once you have set your camera onto this setting you can direct the camera by amending which F-stop you wish to take a picture at.
To help understand this mode I will briefly cover the exposure triangle and the relevance of ISO, aperture & shutter speed to one another.
The exposure triangle indicates the three elements that need to equal each other so that you can take a correctly exposed photograph.
When you put your camera in aperture priority the camera will identify what speed to take each photograph.
As the person holding and taking the picture, you can change both the aperture and the ISO when you are using the aperture priority.
Aperture Priority Mode is simply a shooting mode on your camera, like AUTO or Manual Mode. It’s what’s known as semi-automatic mode because you tell the camera which Aperture to use, and then the camera figures out the correct exposure and sets the Shutter Speed for you.
ISO – the measure of a digital camera sensor’s sensitivity to light
Aperture – the size of the opening in the lens when a picture is taken
Shutter Speed – the amount of time that the shutter is open
EXTRA INFORMATION ON ISO
ISO is simply a measurement of how sensitive your camera is to light. If you are shooting indoors, at night, or outside on a dark cloudy day, you’ll probably want your camera to be MORE sensitive to light.
On the other hand, outdoors on a bright sunny day, you’ll want to keep your ISO number low, which will make your camera LESS sensitive to the light.
Summary
At the start, I stated that you would learn these two things:
How to use aperture correctly and identify how this affects the camera settings
Be able to use aperture priority
My question to you is, do you feel confident to go and try using Aperture Priority? Have you got a better understanding of the aperture?
Take a look at my PDF help sheet to use so that you can take aperture-priority photographs.
Now go, download and get snapping!
My next blog will be a further instalment upon using what you have learned here and then practising the depth of field process.
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