Mastering Aperture: Take Your Photos From Good To Incredible

Mastering Aperture: Take Your Photos From Good To Incredible

Have you ever seen a picture with a crisp subject and a beautifully blurred background, making you ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over how gorgeous the shot came out?  You wonder how the photographer got such beautiful composition, and the answer is simple: they mastered their aperture!

Aperture controls your depth of field, and whether it is deep or shallow. In short, it’s how much your camera is going to be able to keep crisp in the frame. If your aperture is small, your depth of field is shallow, meaning very little will be in focus. If your aperture is large, your depth of field is deep, and much more will be in focus.

Think of your picture as slices of information, foreground, middle ground, and background, but there are many more slices of information in between those. Aperture controls how many of those slices are in focus, and you can change the number of slices in a few different ways.

Aperture Priority

You can set your camera on aperture priority, which means you pick the aperture you want to shoot at (how many slices of the frame you want to be in focus), and the camera decides the rest of the settings (ISO and shutter speed) automatically. This is a good mode to shoot in if you’re new to DSLR shooting and want to dip your toes in the water.

Manual

In manual mode, you choose the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, giving you full control over how your images turn out. You can also change your white balance to the specific scene-setting. Many professional photographers shoot in manual because they have a certain style they shoot in and this makes it easy to keep their photographs in their ‘style’.

Whichever way you choose to shoot, practice makes perfect. With the invention of the digital camera came digital media, and shooting hundreds of test shots costs nothing, as opposed to film, where the film was incredibly expensive. Play with your aperture setting to find how blurry you like your background, and what fits in your style of photography. Visit our blog for more photography tips and tricks, or contact us to find out how we can take your 35mm memories and digitize them!