Appature Comparisons
Appature is the most complicated part of the of photography to understand technicaly, as it effects your pictures in multiple ways.
Changing the appature effects:- The ammount of the image that is in focus (the length of scene which is more or less in focus than the rest of the scene)
- Light that reaches through the lens in to the sensor
- Enhances or reduces the sharpness of the image (most of the time, some lenses handle low and high appatures better than others)
The appature indicates the size of the hole created by the appature blades inside the lens. In phones, this number is fixed, however in compact and larger cameras, this number can be changed. The larger the number, the smaller the hole created by the appature blades, and the less light gets to the sensor. This means for low light and almost all in-door photography, you want this value as small as possible. For example, on my kit lens, at 18mm zoom, the lowest appature it is capable of is f3.5.
However, appature also effects the ammount of the image in focus (which will be shown below)
A lower appature number (oftenly refered to as "faster") will reduce the ammount of the image that is in focus.
The best way to explain this is to see the images below.
The following show the difference that appature will have on your photos.
To keep the exposure the same, Each photo has had the exposure-time altered.
Settings are stated below (in order)
f3.5, 1/30th seconds, 160iso
f5.6, 1/20th seconds, 250iso
f8, 0.1 seconds, 250iso
f11, 0.2 seconds, 250iso
f16, 1/2 second, 200iso
f22, 1 second, 200iso
You can Click the image above for a full-size version (warning, quite big!)
f3.5
f5.6
f8
f11
f16
f22
