Open your aperture

An aperture works like the iris in your eye opening and closing to let in more or less light. In your camera it also controls your depth of field. Your depth of field is the area that will be in focus. Many older lenses had guides on them showing you what would be in focus at what aperture. Without getting into the physics of why, the smaller you make your aperture (bigger number) the larger the area that will be in focus. The wider you make you aperture (smaller number) the narrower the area that will be in focus. This is all well and good but how does this help you take better pictures? One way is to help get rid of distractions. If your subject is looking lovely and giving you a great smile but standing in front of a very visually busy back ground you will end up with a picture that doesn't hold the eye on the subject but is just a bunch of shapes and colors. Sometimes you want everything in focus. In that case you will need to close the aperture. The downside is the smaller the aperture the less light that will reach the CCD or CMOS sensor and the longer you have to keep the shutter open. The long you keep the shutter open, the more likely you are to get a blurry picture. Mid day with lots of light you can close the aperture with out having the shutter open to long, but as it gets darker you may need to use a tripod. For this photo I wanted to get a picture of the flowers as a detail picture, but I wanted to not just have a flower picture but a flower picture that was of this couples wedding. What I didn't want was a picture that had everything in focus. I selected the aperture priority on the camera and set it wide. That allowed me to keep the flowers in focus and yet tell the viewer were the picture was taken. So next time your out shooting switch over to aperture priority and control what you want people to focus on by controlling the size of you aperture.