Monday 3 October 2011

Aperture - depth of field

What is aperture?
Aperture is basically the size of the hole in the lens that lets light through. This effects the depth of field of your images you take. On a camera to adjust this you can change the F numbers. The smaller the F number is the larger the hole and the shallower your depth of field, this is ideal if you want one thing in your photograph in focus and what is behind it blurry. The larger the F number the smaller the hole and this gives a wider depth of field so you can get more of your photograph in focus.

Examples

This is an example that I found on the internet of somebody who has taken this photo using a small F number, something like 3.5, so that they could get the figure in focus and achieve a blurred background.

This is another example but this time the photographer has used a larger F number such as 22 so that they can get all the figures in focus.

My Work
For this image I set my camera to AV and used F4 so that the main focus of the image which is the cat would be sharp and in focus and the background would be soft and blurry. I like these images where the main object is in focus and the rest of it is not because I really like the effect it creates and draws you eye to one certain thing. I think smaller F numbers are good for taking things such as self portraits because you may just want the person who is in the shot to be focused on and the rest of the image to be softer and not as sharp as the person is the main focus of the photograph.

This is the same object as in the other photograph but this time I took the picture using F22 so that everything in my photograph including the background would be in focus. I don't like this photograph as much as the other one I took because when everything is in focus I don't think it looks as good. Large F numbers like this would be good for taking shots such as landscapes because you do not necessarily want just one thing in focus.



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