Photography How To: The Exposure Triangle: Part 1: Aperture

I'm not a great photographer, and I'm still learning. But I thought it would be a good thing to share my knowledge with the steem community so that I can learn more and get better.

When you're using a camera and trying to take good photographs it is important to understand what affects the outcome of the photograph you are taking given the set-up that you are using. An essential factor of a great photo is getting the right exposure; underexpose your photograph and you'll get a very dark image, overexpose the photograph and you'll have missing details and what may appear to be a whitewash over your image.

3 Factors that affect your exposure of your image are; Aperture, Shutter Speed & ISO. These 3 factors are called the Exposure Triangle, together they determine how balanced your photos' exposure is.

I'll break explaining the 3 factors into 2 separate parts, this is because understanding all of them at once and learning to adjust them to create the photograph you desire can be a rather complex & confusing task. To begin I'll explain aperture, then finish with a second part shutter speed and ISO. Let's begin -

Aperture is the degree to which your camera lens is open; for those with a little bio background it is like how your pupils dialate to increase it's size in order to let more light into your eye or constricts to decrease its size and reduce the amount of light that enters your eye.

How open/close your aperture is in photography terminology is referred to as your f-stop; here's a infochart for better reference:

Now remember, the bigger your aperture the smaller the f-stop value.

The bigger your aperture, the more light you let into your camera; but your depth of focus becomes shallow.

Depth of focus is another photography term, it describes the range at which your lens is able to focus. In more simpler terms the shortest and longest distance from your lens where the subjects in your image will be in focus. Imagine you're taking a photograph and you want to keep everything in focus, you need to have a small aperture. If you want to focus on a flower, animal or person and want everything before or after the subject to be blur, you need a big aperture. This is a great way to create portraits or take wildlife photos; it creates more emphasis on your subject of focus and creates a wonderful bokeh.

So, in dark light your aperture should be a little bigger and in bright/excess light your aperture can be a little smaller. However there are other ways to manipulate the exposure of your photograph; we'll get to that in the next guide.

|Fun Fact| Bokeh is actually a japanese word that means blur, haze, however, in the right context can also be used as mental haze, craziness, senility. In photography terms it means the aesthetic blur/ circles of light that occur when using a large aperture due to the subjects that are out of focus in your photograph

An example of bokeh can be seen in the photo of the lotus flower above, you see the smooth blur of the background and the intrusive white circles caused by the reflection of light on the surface of the water? That's bokeh. I wouldn't call that great bokeh, but everyone's opinion differs

Do you manipulate your aperture for other reasons than those I've stated above? What other techniques do you use when you are out with your camera?

Feel free to comment any questions, feedback and or just comment to chat about photography or connect; I'd love to hear from you guys!