Understanding aperture in digital photography

For new DSLR users, the number of terminologies used in photography can be overwhelming and what they mean can be difficult to grasp. However, if you like reading the manual and learning more about them from various sources, you will likely to get a better understanding even as easy as under five minutes.

Aperture is one word that made me dropped my jaw when I first attended my photography club meetings during high school. During that time we were only exposed to non digital point and shoot and SLR cameras. I have forgotten most part of it as I find it cumbersome to go with films and having to spend that extra cash especially when I was still in school.

Ok, enough blabbering, so what is aperture really? Aperture is referred to the lens diaphragm opening inside a photographic lens. It is an adjustable gap in which light comes in, very similar to the iris of your eye. To illustrate this, imagine the window curtain of your room. It is a bright and sunshiny day outside. The curtain behaves like an aperture that controls the amount of light that enters your room. If you close your window curtain, you will shut the lights from entering your room thus having a very dark vision from within your room.

The usage of aperture is highly favored, used effectively and passionately by professional photographers. The difference for an amateur photographer like me or you is that we are learning and applying what we know about aperture at a much basic introductory level and practicing as much as we could to better our photographic experience.

So what are there to know about aperture? Aperture size is usually calibrated or configured in terms of f-numbers or f-stops. The lower the number of f-stops such as F2 means the larger opening of the lens diaphragm is. In contrast, high f-stops such as F22 would mean smaller aperture size.

On most DSLR cameras, there’s an aperture priority mode that you can use to capture images apart from program or automatic modes. Aperture priority basically means that you get to set the depth of field manually and your camera will set the right shutter speed in order to get the optimum exposure. This is possible because of the built-in electronic metering circuit available in most DSLR cameras.

Aperture is used to select the depth of field and combining aperture with shutter speed, you get the exposure such that

Exposure = Aperture + Shutter Speed