12 Weeks to Better Photography - Week 1

This is a free online course from Two Peas In A Bucket and it seems to be a great course for those just learning about photography. My hubby surprised me with my DSLR camera a few months ago so I could learn to use it before we went to Hawaii and that did not happen, so I am going to learn now! I can fumble my way through and get decent pictures, but I definitely want to learn more. Well, I am a little behind, I think they are on week 5 or 6 now, so I am going to try to be really ambitious and play catch up this weekend!

Lesson 1

The first lesson is all about Aperture. The size of the aperture determines the amount of light that enters your camera at one time, therefore affecting how much of your photo is in focus. Another term for aperture is f/stop, you will see them used interchangeably.

The wider the opening, the more light that enters your camera and vice versa. The thing that can be most confusing is that a wider opening has a lower f/stop. For example a low f/stop, such as f/1.4 is a wide-open aperture and a high f/stop, such as f/22, is considered a closed aperture. Tricky huh?

The assignment was to take three photos of the same fixed object at different f/stops.

Here is my first photo, which was taken at f/4.5 (this is the largest aperture I have on my camera)

As you can see, the only thing that is really in focus is the flower, the background is blurry, which is what we would expect from a fairly wide-open aperture.

This picture was taken at f/9.

Now, more of the shed is in focus.

The final picture was taken at f/29 (the smallest aperture on my camera)

And now everything, my ugly shed and all, are in focus!

Aperture is as simple as that!