One of the cool things about photography is discovering how all of the camera's settings work and how those settings affect the final image. One of the easiest settings to change is the camera's aperture setting. The aperture setting controls the iris opening for the lens.
A low aperture number indicates that the iris is wide open. A high aperture number indicates that the iris is closed. An open iris or low aperture number means that more light enters into the lens and hits the cameras image sensor (or the film for those of us still shooting on film). A closed iris or high aperture number means that less light enters into the lens and hits the image sensor. The other affect that aperture has is to blur areas of the image that are not the main area of focus.
Most point and shoot cameras and all DSLR cameras have the ability to manually adjust the aperture. You can put the camera into "manual" mode and adjust the settings yourself, or you can use the camera's Aperture Priority mode to force the camera's aperture setting to remain constant when you take photos.
Here are some examples of different aperture settings.
Here's the photo without any notation.
Here's the same photo with the area of focus indicated.
Here's another example. This time the area of focus is in the background, along the line of homes and distant trees.
In this particular case though, the photo would be more pleasing if the leaves were the main area of focus. We can still see the homes, but having the distant trees and homes blurred pulls your attention to the sharply focused leaves.
On the other hand, if you close the lens iris by using a higher aperture number, you'll be able to get more of the image in focus.
But, since less light is hitting the image sensor, you may have to use a slow shutter speed to achieve a nice even exposure. So that will be a topic for next month: shutter speed and exposure.
Until then, have fun photographing all the fall colors, while they last, which won't be long will all the rain and wind we've had!
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