Day 2: Aperture, Part 1

This is an image I today at the Beaufort cemetery. In the foreground is a headstone in sharp focus. Beyond that, you can see the other headstones starting just a few feet away. Only the nearest headstone is in focus. This works great for portrait photos, where you would want your subject in focus, and to slightly blur the busy background, thereby drawing attention to your subject. This is called a shallow DEPTH OF FIELD.

That is where the APERTURE (Canon Av, Nikon A) comes in. It is what controls the amount of light entering the camera, as was discussed yesterday. The benefit of this is you can control the depth of field of your photo. For the above shot, I set the aperture at its largest opening (in this case, f-1.8). For the next shot, I did just the opposite: Because the entire scene is in focus, your attention is not drawn to any particular part of the scene. You get to enjoy the entire vista. For this shot, my aperture was set at f-16. As you can see, the lower the f-__, the less that is in focus. This will be explained later...