Fundamental Lessons in Photography - Understanding Aperture Like a Professional

Plainly stated, an aperture is a hole. When thinking of photography, and more specifically a lens, an aperture is the hole in the lens through which light, reflected off your subject travels through. It is really as simple as that. I will use the following analogy to help you understand aperture. Imagine the rays of light entering your lens as being an infinite number of arrows, shot by an army of archers, protecting a medieval castle. Now if you have a small hole in your lens, in other words a narrow aperture and you were pointing your camera straight at the archer’s bows, then the likely hood of the arrows entering your lens to be dead straight, or technically speaking, greatly collimated, is very high. On the other hand, should you increase aperture really wide open, you would have arrows coming in all over the place, which would result in only a few arrows, or rays of light, being collimated or very parallel to one another.

From the above analogy it stands to reason that in your lens and camera combination, the rays of light entering it will eventually strike an image plane. If the rays strike this plane in a highly collimated fashion, which can only happen if you set your camera to a very small aperture, then the resulting photograph will be in sharp focus. On the other hand, if you open up your aperture setting, then the rays of lights imprinting themselves on your optical sensor would be un-collimated or somewhat scattered resulting in a situation where you will only realize a sharp focus for some of the light rays entering your equipment.

The result of parallel light rays or a small or narrow aperture is a photograph which is very sharp over the entire picture. Conversely, the result of a large or broad aperture is a photograph in which your subject onto whom you focused on is sharp, and the rest of the photo is blurred or in photographic terms, the photograph has some degree of bokeh to it — the extent of which depends on the aperture ability of your lens.

Conrad Strehlau is a professional photographer in South Africa and has been taking photos with passion for over fifteen years. He specializes in several fields including portrait, wildlife, wedding and outdoor photography. His website is http://www.wedding4africa.co.za/