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Aperture

September 23, 2022 George Flavell Leave a comment

Aperture refers to the opening in a camera lens through which the light passes to reach the sensor or film inside. It’s an adjustable mechanism that controls the level of light entering the camera, which in turn affects the brightness and depth of field in an image.

How to Adjust Your F Stop / Aperature With Canon Rebel Xti - Digital Photography Hobbyist — Av button on a Canon camera (used to adjust aperture value in manual modes)

Aperture is measured in f-stops, which are values representing the size of the lens opening relative to the lens focal length. The larger the opening, the more light reaches the sensor/film, and the smaller the f-stop value, and vice versa. This also affects the exposure of the image, which, when adjusted manually, can be a bit of a balancing act when trying to maintain the correct exposure and the desired depth of field.

Diagram showing aperture ranges and depth of field

As mentioned, aperture values on a camera can be manually adjusted, or automatically – depending on the camera and the shooting mode in use. Wider apertures are typically used in low-light environments or to create a shallower depth of field, which keeps the subject in focus and the background more blurred. A smaller aperture, however, is more often used for well-lit scenes or to achieve greater depths of field, keeping both the foreground and background in focus.

Overall, the aperture is a key setting when it comes to camera operation and can drastically affect a final image.

Photogames

September 19, 2022 George Flavell Leave a comment

John Baldessari

John Baldessari is known as the father of conceptual art for his unique ideas and his dependency on the concept of luck. His works compiled elements of game-playing, accidents and chance, and he used different camera settings to enrich them. One of these settings that he used was different shutter speeds, which we experimented with in this photoshoot.

Shutter speed

Shutter speed within a camera controls exposure, or the amount of time the shutter has to let in light while capturing the image. It is measured in either full seconds, or fractions of a second, the shorter the exposure, the clearer and less motion-blurred the photograph will be. Longer exposures are typically used when the camera is supported by a tripod, as the camera usually shakes quite a bit when held in a photographer’s hand.

Photogames – Shutter speed (Shadowboxing)

We used different shutter speeds (1/30, 1/150, 1/250) to capture movement. First we took images of different movements by shadowboxing with the cameraman – here’s some of the better results.

All of these images were composed of elements of good lighting, little or no motion blur, and a sharp focus on the subject.

The rest of the images that we took here were either blurred, out of focus, overexposed, or just didn’t work out in some form.

A large sum of these photographs didn’t fit the criteria for this experiment, or lacked good composition.

Photogames – Shutter speed (Balls)

We then threw three balls into the air and tried to capture images of them in different shapes in mid-air, the best photographs resulting in the shape of a (nearly) straight line and a triangle.