Lauren's Digital Photography : Lesson 2: Master Aperture

Photo number one before I did my set. I liked this one the most but I wanted to effectively get all the ground details without moving the frame of my camera.

Aperture can be a tricky thing to wrap your head around. A few years ago a teacher I had made it really easy for me. He took a group of us out to a football field, poked a small whole in a small sheet of aluminum and the told us to look through. I didn’t quite understand how my vision acclimated to the distance but everything very far away became very clear. To this day, when I think of aperture and depth of field, the first thing that comes to mind, is that tiny little pinhole in a sheet of aluminum. When setting the aperture on your camera, the higher the number means the smaller of the hole that the shutter will expose to light. The smaller the number means the larger the hole and the sensor (when using digital) will light more quickly. This accounts for the fact that when you change aperture, the shutter speed must change also to provide a correct correlation for the exposure.
For this assignment I chose from a few different ideas of what to photograph. I would like to redo this week and take a day where all I did was photograph things and practice with aperture. I can’t speak for anyone else but this week flew by so fast I felt like all at once this assignment was due, and I wished I had put more of myself into it. I can’t say I’m exactly impressed with how my photo’s came out this week, but next weeks will be better and my shoot properly shows how depth of field can be created by the changing of aperture. I find that in photography, the photo’s that strike me the most are the ones that really capture something in the foreground with the shallow depth of field. I think it sort of forces the viewer to see what you see. To interpret it the way you meant for it to be seen. As with all photographs-isn’t the point to get others to see through your eyes? To pull the beauty of a moment in your life and capture it the way you saw it as beautiful?
I suppose I’m getting off topic now, but the point is I have a habit of pulling out my macro 75-300mm lens and using it to show what I thought was striking by focusing on one thing and blurring out the rest of the world, leaving no guess as to what I’m trying to see. However for this assignment I simply used my 28-135mm lens. I took my Mamiya tlr camera outside for a walk, and photographed down at it in a progression of apertures from f22-f5.0. As the photos go on it becomes clear that the concrete underneath the camera becomes more in focus as well as its straps. You can more clearly see the way it works if you look immediately from the f22 photo to the f5.0. I also kept my camera in the Av mode so that I only changed the aperture and my camera changed the shutter speed for me. I hope you enjoy these and if not, I’ll promise to set the bar a little higher for myself in the next lesson. =] Thanks

f/5.0 at 1/400sec