A digital scrapbook of photography tips - learn and be inspired to take better photographs with your digital camera.
An aperture is a hole. Holes come in various sizes, and generally, holes let things pass through them.
In photography, the aperture is the name given to the hole in the camera's lens which lets light pass through into the digital camera body. The size of this aperture can be controlled by the photographer, or automatically by the camera. The bigger the size of the hole, the more light that can pass through.
Apertures are denoted by an "f number", eg f2.8 or f22.
Due to a misfortune of mathematical circumstances, all to do with complicated equations that we won't go into here, f numbers can be confusing. The smaller the f number, the larger the size of the hole in the lens. The larger the f number, the smaller the size of the lens' hole.
Each time you enlarge, or reduce, the size of the aperture in the lens by one full "stop" (eg from f11 to f8, or f4 to f5.6) you double or halve, respectively, the amount of light reaching the digital camera's sensor.
DEPTH OF FIELD or DEPTH OF FOCUS is the term given to the amount (the depth) of sharp focus in a photograph, ie how much foreground and background is in sharp detail.
Large apertures (remember, that's small f numbers like f2.8) produce a very narrow depth of field, making a subject "stand out" from its surroundings - like in the flower photograph above.
Small apertures (yes, that's large f numbers like f22) produce a very large depth of field, giving sharp focus from the foreground of an image right to infinity - like in the landscape photograph of Snowdonia above.
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