An In-depth Look at Aperture

This week’s focus was on depth and changing the aperture/the f-stop on your camera to get different levels of depth. It was a little hard to wrap my head around the concept at first, but once I got the hang of it, it was really fun!

Shallow Depth: Blossoms

This picture was shot with an f/4.0 with a shutter speed of 1/200. Because the f-stop was a smaller number, a smaller amount of the picture was in focus. This is because the smaller the f-stop = the wider the aperture = more light reaches the lens. This causes closer objects to become sharp, while everything else blurs in the back.

Shallow Depth: Little Flowers

Here is another example of a shallow depth image. Yes, I took a lot of pictures of flowers for this assignment! This was shot with an f/8 and 1/600.

Deep Depth: Daffodils at the Taylor

This picture is an example of what the depth looks like with a more narrow aperture. This picture was shot with an aperture of f/22 and a shutter speed of 1/80. A bigger number aperture means a smaller opening, so less light gets in, causing a larger amount of the image to be in focus. If I were to use a smaller number aperture, only the flowers would be in focus, while the Taylor building behind would be blurred.

Deep Depth: Trees

This is another example of a picture with a deeper depth. You can see both the trees in the foreground and in the background. There are more details because this image is a little sharper. It was shot with an f/10 and 1/100. I think I could have gotten it sharper in the back, so I’ll have to look out for that next time!