aperture-priority or aperture value as it's also known
is one of the most versatileof the semi auto modes on your Dslr camera,
it's brilliant, I use it all the time, i thought it would be a good idea
to come down to bournemouth,
go on the sea front, in the sunshine, becah huts, great place to demonstrate it,
best laid plans of mice and men, it's pouring with rain on the day of the shoot.
luckily I have a mate in bournemouth who's got one of the biggest shops
you can see and it's full of
really shiny things that we can use to photograph.
See what I mean? It's like being in a great big grown up
boys
sweety shop isn't it, a great
place like this.
Now all these bits and ppieces are nice and sparkly
which makes some really interesting pictures, but surprisingly a place like this
is much harder the photograph than you might imagine
because there's so much going on it's quite hard to separate the subject
matter of your image
from what's going on in the background and all around it things can start to
look a bit cluttered.
aperture-priority is a brilliant brilliant mode to use in circumstances
like this.
First of all what does it do and how does it work?
When you're in aperture priority mode, it's kinda the next step on from fully auto.
it gives you control of the aperture of the camera as well as
your iso, and your white balance
Now as you open your aperture, obviously more light comes in through the lens
and it has an effect on the exposure and the opposite happens when you go the other way,
when you close it down to a smaller aperture you've got much less light coming in.
As you change that aperture, in aperture priority mode
the camera will go away and find you the relevant shutter speed to work
in the lighting conditions you're working in because sadly there isn't a
correct exposure so like indoors it's a i dunno, a fifth,
F8 or something it is nothing like that,
it's all fluid and moving around. Let's have a look,
so i'm in apeture priority, i'm gonna set an apeture of
F 8, no reason, i'm just choosing F 8.
Now if I point the camera over there
i'm getting one eighth of a second at F 8, because it's not very bright in here
in a way that's quite a good thing that we had to come in out of the rain
because we can see the changing shutter speeds, much more accurately.
Eighth of a seocnd at F 8 if we're pointing over there. If I pointed it at the sky light above
Jayne and her camera
it shoots straight up to a forty-fifth of a second,
so the aperture isn't changing but the camera is changing the shutter speed to
work with the aperture i've chosen.
The question that is probably burning in all your minds is
why would I want to change the aperture if the camera is gonna
mess about and find shutter speeds to work with it, let's go and have alook and i'll
show you.
Now remember what I said about these exciting but
cluttered environments? It's very very easy to lose your subject into the background
you have to be very very careful and selective as you select it.
I'm gonna use this bike here because it's a real
wide machine, it's a true fat mans motorcycle, and I love it,
This front tire is about the size of a rear tire of a ferrari,
it's tremendously, I don't know it has great presence sort of
going on there, the shot I wanna use is the dramatic
power of the front end of the bike, running back trhough the length bit
and then up on the stand it there we've got this beautiful old retro bike,
which incidently mark and his team here built from the formula one racing driver Jackie
Stewart's son.
Paul stewart, he's the man who owns it, cool though. Let's get our shot set up.
I'm using a wide angle lens for this one so this is about aperture-priority
and wide angle lens now a wide angle lens
is a very wide field of view, there's lot's going on but it's particularly tricky to isolate things.
it also has an enormous depth of the field inherently,
so you wanna use that if you want lot's of depth of field, everything sharp, front
to back, you wouldn't use a wide lens if you wanna start seperating it out,
and it would look a bit odd with a shot like this if you had blurry bits and sharp
bits.
first thing get the composition under control.
I use live view quite alot for this, because
is just easier. Gotta use a tripod because we're indoors in low-ish light
there we go, i'm gonna put a bit of a tilt on the camera
because i think it's good, it's wacky you know it's dynamic
it's engines and boys and bikes and stuff. Next step,
set up the exposure set up what we want. Aperture priortiy is literally F 16,
it's a very small aperture it's not the extreme aperture, this lens goes to F 22,
but i'm gonna use F 16, because it's gonna be not quite at the extreme of the lens
we'll get the best quality we can
but it gives this maximum depth of field.
So, aperture priority. We set F 16
the camera is dealing with the exposure, that has set a one second exposure, it's gonna be
two clicks click as it
opens one second later, click as it closes. Gotta use a tripod, hence
any movement, you've got a blurred picture, for that reason i'm gonna use self timer
to trigger it, because I don't wanna be touching the camera at the crusial
moment
focus, I'm gonna focus on this fork stantion down here
because the depth of field is so extreme it will still be sharp all the way
through.
Just get that focus, set up
like that, self timer. Everythings ready to race,
and just go for it, press the button,
come back from a camera, and don't touch it
there we go, there's our shot.
Brilliant isn't it, we've controlled depth of field and what we want
and the camera has dealt with the exposure.