Hi! In this video, I’m going to give you you five reasons why you should shoot with small apertures.
Hi! I’m Adam and welcome to First Man Photography
the channel that will help you take your photography to the next level. I’m now pleased to say
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Small apertures with big f numbers, generally, have a pretty bad reputation as we are conditioned
to believe that we all want to be chasing down those big apertures, those big prime
lenses that are expensive and often difficult to use. When we hear about lens with a huge
aperture like f1 or f1.2, we immediately assume that it is a quality lens and often that is
the case. Nothing wrong with shooting with a small aperture and it works well in many
situations. One of the issues people often talk about with small apertures is diffraction.
Now this does cause a small reduction in quality at the small apertures and high f stop numbers
but really going to have to be pixel peeping to get down in there and see the difference
in quality. Small apertures will still produce beautiful images even when printed and blown
up very large. So let’s get into five reasons why I think you should use them.
First off is, that with small apertures, you get a big depth of field. This is great for
several situations such as shooting landscape photography where it is absolute essential
when you want to get you foreground interest and background interest in focus. Using that
small aperture will allow you to do that. Also, when you're shooting portraits in a
group situation, you want to make sure you get everybody in focus because there is nothing
worse than seeing a group portrait where one person towards the front has their eyes nicely
in focus and a person standing slightly back is out of focus because it really shows that
it is not a quality image. So stopping down to a small aperture will allow you to achieve
getting all those eyes in focus. It’s also a vital trick for macro photography and product
photography where, when you get really close to your subject, you’re going to have much
smaller depth of field. We can see this in macro photography very easily. So we can minimise
this effect by stopping down to a much smaller aperture. Some macro lenses even go down to
f32 which will let you get much of your subject in focus as possible even when you're nice and close in.
The smaller aperture means less light is getting
through your lens into the sensors. What that means is to get a proper exposure, especially
in lowlight conditions, is that we need to use a longer exposure. We can use this to
our advantage though to capture long exposure photography even without the use of filters.
In this picture, that I took fairly recently of the London Eye, I took it without any filter
whatsoever and it's about a 2 minute 45 second picture taken at f22. It really shows you
can get great shots by utilising the small aperture.
Shooting with these minuscule apertures really enhances the star or halo effect coming from
bright sources of light shining straight at your camera. This can include artificial sources
of light like you saw in that previous picture or like in this sunset shot. It works well
when shooting straight at the sun. There are filters to simulate this effect but it’s
nice to be able to do it naturally with the aperture blades in your lens.
Number four is that small apertures often produce sharper images. Apertures at f5.6
and f8, which are still pretty small apertures, will produce on most lenses the sharpest image
that that lens can produce. You will start to lose sharpness once you go beyond f16 but
again you’re really going to have to be pixel peeping to really notice the difference.
It's a good fact to know when you want to maximise the quality of your gear especially
for studio portrait and product photography.
Number five is that it will improve your skills.
Thinking about the aperture you use will go a long way to really controlling your exposure.
That’s an important step to take your photography to the next level. It will help you towards
the goal of shooting in manual mode and this is a step towards having total control over
your camera. For me, this is an important step because it frees you up to really focus
on your art and capture beautiful images. Please give the video the thumbs up and leave
a comment down below. I’d love to hear from you about how much you use small apertures
and whether you agree with me or not. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe
to the channel. There’s videos going up on a Wednesday and on a Sunday. I really think
it can help you take your photography to the next level. I’ll see on another video very
soon. I’m Adam! This is First Man Photography…
Out!!!!
Absolutely roasting in here today. I hope it hasn’t affected the sound quality with
a window open. If it has, I apologise for that. With these video lights and the heat
today, it’s absolutely sweltering.