Quick tip: how to remember the F-Stop Scale like a boss
Jun 11, 2017
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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you know how funny the f-stop scale is. All those weird numbers that make no sense.. (well, they do make sense if you look at the square roots of powers of two, but this is really not making anybody’s lives easier).
Griffin Hammond came up with a clever trick to remember the entire scale of F-Stops using only two numbers: 1 and 1.4.
The secret to the method is making a series of numbers that starts with those two numbers and then the next member is the prev-prev number times two.
So, it’s 1, then 1.4, then 1×2=2, then 1.4×2=2.8, then 2×2=4, then 2.8×2=5.6 and so on.
[Griffin Hammond via nofilmschool]
P.S. 1.8 is not a “round” f-stop number
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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15 responses to “Quick tip: how to remember the F-Stop Scale like a boss”
Well duh, it’s in the definition of aperture number. And it’s actually multiplication by the square root of two each full stop (1.4142…).
And that is useful for what?
generating clicks, apparently.
F(n)=sqrt(n).
So actually you need to remember 1, 1.4, and 2, because everything is multiplied by 2. Convenient trick though.
Like you need to do addition to learn a 6 number sequence. You can remember your phone number hopefully.
Really? Is it that hard?
The multiplication lineup changes with f/11, because that should write f/11.3 – resulting that f/22 is actually f/22.6 and f/45 is again a rounded value.
For practical reasons, it is not all math.
f/11.2 (pet peeve)
Isn’t that how everybody is doing it since decades
Are people still using f stops with digital?
Photographer people are.
Only people who use digital to take photos.
Tomorrow: NWO’s agenda = One world religion!
“a clever trick to remember the entire scale of F-Stops using only two numbers: 1 and 1.4.”
Like a clever trick of multiplying two numbers by learning multiplication?
which in any case breaks down at 5.6 x 2 since the F stop is 11.
It’s not a trick, in so much as learning your √２ times table.