Master Aperture

1. Be a Better Photographer: Hey everybody, It's Kate Sylvia here today we're going to talk about aperture, that tiny little opening inside your lens that controls a lot. Don't do that. I'm going to show you what the aperture is like actually physically is inside the lens. I'm going to talk about how we can change it and why we would choose certain apertures for certain situations. I've been teaching landscape photographers for nearly 15 years. I want you to get a really good understanding of aperture to make yourself a better photographer. So we're going to have some fun and maybe even a little bit of pizza. I will see you in class. 2. What is Aperture: Okay, I'm gonna do my best to kinda show you how this is done on most cameras. So the thumb dial is pretty much your control for your main control. If you are in manual shooting mode, which is what I am right now, this is going to control the shutter speeds. So if I do that, you can see the shutter speed changing there on the left, it's highlighted in orange. And this on this particular camera changes the aperture. So this is F1 and F2. Now if I switch this to aperture priority, this doesn't do anything anymore. Now, the thumb is going to change the aperture alone and it's coming to self-adjust for the shutter speed. And the, if I put it on auto ISO, it'll change the ISO as well, but it's kind of freaking out and blinking right now because it's way too dark and I believe I have the lens cap on. It's telling me that there's no way that it could take a properly exposed picture. But now the thumbnail is changing the aperture. Now. Let me show you my other camera will turn that one off. Now this camera has two dials. Now if you have a more professional style camera, again, I'm on manual shooting modes, so this is going to change my shutter speed. This is no longer an aperture dial. My aperture is on the front, so I've got a front dial right here. So if I rotate that, that is changing my aperture, that is changing my shutter speed. But same thing happens here. This one, I got to push the dial and rotate it, which is a little annoying. But anyway, that one, if I put it in aperture priority now, the thumb is just changing the aperture. The shutter speed is going to change on its own. Sometimes you have a camera that has just the main dial, which by default is your shutter speed unless you're in aperture priority, if you put it in aperture priority, the thumb is going to change the aperture. However, if you have it in manual mode, again, it's shutter speed by default. So try and get her some of that reflection there. So it's shutter speed by default. If you want to change the aperture on certain cameras, you have to press a little button. There's typically a little button somewhere in here or up in here that has a tiny little photo of an aperture opening on it. Just a little circle with a bunch of slits in it. And sometimes you have to say press that and rotate the dial at the same time. Other cameras and other cameras will have, if you are able to display your shutter speed, your aperture, and your ISO on the back of the screen. Some of them have a tap feature where you can just tap the aperture and then either rotate the dial or tap it and drag it like a slider. So just depending on your particular camera model, is either you will have it accessible right here with a button in the front, in the bag on a dial. You'll just have to look at your particular cameras specs online or the user's manual in order to figure that out. So hope that helps. Okay, So we actually have to talk about what This is physically inside the lens. So within the lens itself, this is actually the physical opening that the light travels through. What's listed on your lens is actually the maximum aperture. So if we look right here where it says 2.8, that is the maximum size that that aperture in this particular lens will get. And the bigger that opening, the more amount of light that is led through. Now you might hear some people refer to a lenses fast. This is a really fast lens. It really doesn't have anything specifically to do with the aperture in the sense that it makes the lens shoot faster. That's not what they mean. They basically mean that if you've got a really wide maximum aperture allowable on the lens, it allows you to use a faster shutter speed and that's just the basics of manual exposure. Understanding that relationship between aperture and shutter speed. If you want the actual definition of an f-stop, that is the ratio of the focal length of the lens to the entrance pupil. Do you really need to know that? Not really. Don't worry about it. What I want you to take away from this is when you are looking at these lenses like this one right here. An F4 lens, that's the most that it will open. So it will actually open a little bit less than that F2 0.8 that we just saw. So let's see this in reality here. What you're looking at here is the actual physical inside of one of my macro lenses. So I just opened it up to different apertures, put something colorful behind it so that we can see very clearly through there. And you can see right here what the different apertures are listed as. So if we go from something like f to f 5.6, we're actually doubling the amount of light. That's a huge difference when you're talking about exposure. So you can actually physically see here that this opening is smaller than this opening where we go from here to here, we double the light. By contrast, when we go from here to here, we cut the light in half. So you go from F2.8 to F4, you cut the light in half. Now these numbers can be a little bit confusing because the number two or 2.8 is a smaller number than F4. But when you think about it, like slices of pizza. So you've got half a pizza. Hey guys, I can't do this if you're just going to take the whole thing away from me, that is not helpful. Anyway. If you're talking about a half a pizza, it's bigger than a quarter of a pizza, right? Even though the number two is smaller than the number four. So these are fractions that you're looking at. That's what that little mark is right there. So F4 is like 1 fourth basically you can think of it like that. So these are the typical f-stops that you'll see and you will see numbers in-between these. It doesn't go straight from 2-way to F4. Most cameras, when you change your aperture, as well as your shutter speed, they change in 1 third increments. So you will see numbers in-between these two. But when we go from 56 to F eight, that's referred to as one full stop. So if we open up one-stop from five-sixths to F4, that's referred to as opening up. So if we open up, we're just physically making the aperture bigger. That's what that's referring to. And going from say F6, F11 is one full stop. Going from five to six to F4 is one full stop. So if you've got an image that's severely underexposed, so it's really, really dark. You may have to open up to full stops. So if you're shooting at F22, you may have to go, hey, let's try F 16, and that's not bright enough. So let's go all the way to F 11. Or you could choose any number in-between. When you go the opposite direction, it's commonly referred to as stopping down. So you'll hear this language as you learned photography. Okay, now that we understand the physics a little bit better, Let's talk about what aperture actually controls. I'll see you there. 3. What Happens When I Change the Aperture?: So what exactly does aperture control? It controls two major things in photography. One of them is the amount of light that enters through the lens and makes it all the way to the sensor. That has to do with your exposure. So here we've got too much light coming through, not enough light coming through. And just the right amount. You can control your exposure by stopping down that aperture. So making the actual diaphragm in the lens smaller so that less light comes in, which makes your image darker. Or you can open it up and make your image brighter and also control one more thing. It controls depth of field and that is the amount of your image that is intact, sharp focus. So this image right here, which is just inside of a flower, the only thing that's actually Sharp is this tiny little section right here. Everything else is super-duper soft and believe it or not, I did that on purpose. With this image, everything is in sharp focus from the thing that is closest to me here, everything in the middle ground, everything in the background, tack sharp. So I know that those F numbers were a little bit confusing in that last video with the whole size of the pizza thing. But when it comes to depth of field, it actually makes a little bit more sense. So the lower f-number means less depth of field. So lower f-number, less in-focus, higher f-number more in focus. If you can remember that, then it will really help you understand aperture. So how do we choose our aperture? Here's a macro shot. I was shooting this at F 123, which most lenses don't go to that this is a special lens. Macro lenses can sometimes do this depending on the lens. So if 40, I can see some detail in the background here, the entire flower is in sharp focus. If I switch it to f 20, I get less than focus, a lot less in-focus. Actually. Again, lower f-number, 20s, lower than 40. I have less in-focus. If I go all the way down to F5.6, the only thing that is left in sharp focus here is the very tips of these petals. So I have completely blurred the background. There's no detail left there. So let me ask you this question. Which one is right? If your answer was all of them, That's the correct answer. How much you keep in focus is entirely up to you and what your purpose is with your image, what you want the viewer to see and understand. How can I change that depth of field? There's actually multiple ways. So the obvious way is to change the aperture. We've already been talking about that. So here's a shot that I took and I wanted to get everything in focus from front-to-back. So this was the final image right here, everything in focus. But if I zoom in on this little section right here at F8, it was starting to get a little bit blurry more towards the background. I was losing it, losing depth of field by shooting at F8, by switching it up to F 20, I've managed to get everything in sharp focus from front to back, higher f-number, more in focus. You can also change the focal length. Wide-angle lenses have more depth of field at a given aperture than a telephoto lens at the same Aperture. F8 teen is going to have more in focus from front to back. So more depth of field as 16 millimeters then at 600 millimeters. So let's take a look at these two images. Same concept here. Both of these images were shot at F8. Same aperture, right? Kate, but you just said that there's less depth of field and how can I have all this depth of field when they were both shot at F8. It has to do with that focal length. So this image on the left was shot at 16 millimeters. Again, wide angle lenses have more depth of field at a given aperture than this, than a telephoto lens. So the one on the right here was shot at 300 millimeters. Now, you can either zoom in to accomplish this or you can get physically closer to your subject in order to lose depth of field. The closer you are, the less depth of field you have at any given aperture. So that's why in that previous image of that kind of purple and yellow flower, you can see that even at F2.8, a lot of fat flour was out-of-focus. It's because I was so, so close to it. My 50 millimeter macro allows you to get within an inch of your subjects. So I was super-duper close. And being that close, you lose depth of field. So let's look at some examples. All of these images were FT or higher, so lots and focus from front-to-back. This one was F22. That was f 20. Again, if you look at what's exactly right at my feet right here, tack sharp focus. If you look at everything in the distance, tax sharp focus. Same thing here. You might be saying, well, why not just shoot this at F8? You can. But that other image that I showed you was also a wide angle and I lost a little bit of what was in sharp focus towards the back when I was at F8. They're not all, the lenses are exactly the same. So I typically shoot wide angle it F1 or F2. Or you can do what's called focus stacking, which is a whole another class some other time. This image was shot at F9. Now why did I pick F9 instead of F5.6 or f 20? I wanted something in the middle. I want it to be able to see all of these flowers in sharp focus, especially these right along the edge here. But I didn't want to blur the background so much that it completely disappeared. And you didn't understand that that was a tree back there? When I shot this at F4. That's exactly what happened. This got so blurry that it just turned into a mush of color. I chose a little bit, a little bit more depth of field F9, so that I could still create some separation between my foreground subject and my background. If I shot this at f 20 or F22, the entire thing would be in focus and the flowers in the foreground would actually compete for attention with the trees that are in the background. So that is your creative decision when you are choosing your aperture, it's not just about making your images brighter or darker. It's really about choosing how much of your foreground, middle ground, and your background is in sharp focus. Here's another example where I intentionally wanted to blur the background in order to create separation. I got very low to the ground in order to do this so that I could get those colorful flowers behind this palmetto leaf. And I ended up at 7.1, which is in-between that F5.6 and that F8. And that was based on the light I needed. I could have done this at F8 and it would look very, very similar. But F8 was just a smidge too dark. So I opened it up to 7.1. This image was shot at. So you can see that the foreground here is quite blurry. There's really no sharp detail here in the water in the foreground, as well as the background. There is no sharp detail there either. That's because my lens was autofocus on this bird tracking it as it flew into the water. And so I've got tax sharp focus on my subject and everything else. In front and behind is nice and softly blurred. If I had shot this at F22, first of all, if 22 is a very, very small aperture, so it would have forced me to either have a longer shutter speed, which I definitely did not want in this situation, or I would have had a boost the ISO extremely high in order to compensate for the very tiny amount of light that I was actually allowing to enter through the aperture. With such a small aperture. Shooting wildlife and portraits and things like this, you're typically better off with the wider apertures to help blur your background creates separation between your subject and your background, which helps focus attention on your subject. Alright, see you in the next video. 4. Super Easy...Super Helpful Project!: Okay, for your project, this is going to be really simple. So either one photo or two photos, but I want you to experiment with your apertures and also with your distance from your subject. I want you to see how that actually works. So I want you to try and get one photo that has shallow depth of field. In other words, there is very little of the image in focus, so your subject can be in sharp focus, but either the background or the foreground or both is blurry. So you're going to use a low F-stop. So F four, if your lens goes two to eight or you know, kudos, 1.4, Go for it. That will definitely help blur, but also getting up and moving. Move closer to your subject. Zoom in on your subject. That will help reduce the depth of field. So just practice with that because it's very, very useful. And also, let's try and get an image with maximum depth of field. So everything in focus from what's really close to you too, What's really far away from you? Easier to achieve with wide-angle lenses. It can be done with medium telephoto as well. It's just a little bit more difficult, but you will have to use a high F-stop. So a very small aperture. I know that's kinda inverse there, but that's that relationship. So FATF 20, something like that to get everything in focus from front to back. Reach out to me if you have any questions or if you're struggling. But I look forward to seeing your results.