Aperture for Nature Photography

What is Aperture?

Aperture forms part of the exposure triangle and refers to the hole through which light passes in a photographic lens.

With your eye this happens automatically because that's how God created us but you will need to set it on your camera body.

The size of the hole is measured in f-numbers or f-stops...

The smaller the number, the larger the hole, e.g. my Nikon 50mm f1.4 lens is my largest aperture lens, which provides least depth of field (DOF) but makes the subject 'pop'. The bigger the number the smaller the hole and the greater the DOF, f22 for example.

Each subsequent f-stop lets in double the light as the previous, so if we use f/22 as the base then f/16 will let in 2X light, while f11 will let in 4X more light than f/22 and so on until we get to f/1.4 that lets in 256X more light than f22!

What does the Aperture Do?

There are three main ways you control the level of DOF: camera to subject distance, lens focal length and lens-aperture but sometimes you will not be able to get closer to a subject and/or you will be limited to a certain lens focal length and this is when aperture comes to the rescue.

The wildlife photographer generally wants the subject to 'pop' so will normally choose a large hole (small f-stops such as f2.8) that produces a very narrow depth of field (subject in focus, background out of focus) and a landscape or macro photographer will choose small holes (large f-stops such as f/16 to f/22), which produce a large depth of field (everything in focus from near to far)

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