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What is Aperture in Photography? A Complete Guide

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Understanding Aperture in photography is understanding one of the fundamentals of how your camera works. It’s one of the three important points of the exposure triangle (along with shutter speed and ISO). By understanding Aperture, you’ll be well on your way to shooting perfect exposures and having maximum creative control over your images.

You don’t have to understand Aperture to take great photos. However, if you want to increase your chances of taking great images every time you head out with your camera, it certainly helps. The aperture is the hole in your lens that opens and closes to let light into the camera. It has a significant effect on both exposure and depth of field (DOF) in the image. However, it can be a little confusing at first and can often seem counterintuitive, particularly for new photographers.

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This is what a portrait looks like at every aperture

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What’s your go-to aperture that you always seem to gravitate towards? Go on, I bet you have one, even if you hesitate to admit it! For me, whether I’m shooting natural light or in a studio, I often seem to end up at f/2.8. For environmental portraits or groups, I’m often swapping between f/8 and  f/11. but that’s just me, and honestly, although I’ve settled into shooting like this over the past few years, I’m not sure I’ve really taken a step back to really think about why I often end up shooting with these apertures.

In this video, portrait photographer Julia Trotti shows us what a portrait of the same model looks like shot with each aperture, from f/1.4 to f/16.

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Here are three main reasons why you don’t want to shoot wide open

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Why would you want a super-fast lens if you can’t shoot at the maximum aperture, right? Well, that’s not really the case. No matter how tempting that shallow depth of field might be, you probably don’t want to use your lens at its widest aperture. In this video, Matt Granger gives you three big reasons why it’s generally a good idea to stop down your lens even just a bit.

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This app lets you use Aperture and iPhoto with your Mac if you’ve upgraded to Catalina

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Although Apple’s Aperture photo editing software has been pretty much unsupported and dead since 2014, there are still people who still choose to use it. Forcing peoples hands, though, Apple pretty much put the final nail in the coffin with the latest macOS Catalina by refusing to even run it. Catalina also made it no longer possible to use iPhoto app (also discontinued).

The reason for their final demise was that Catalina is now a 100% 64-Bit OS, although those are 32-Bit apps. Now, though, programmer Tyshawn Cormier has pulled out the claw hammer and removed that nail with a new app called Retroactive that lets you use both of these applications under the Catalina operating system.

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Aputure just announced a sun-like 600D LED light

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Aputure is killing it here at IBC 2019, and today they announced a light that will probably get DPs drooling until it is released. The light is part of the Light Storm Cxxx family and is a step up from the latest 300Dii.

If the 120Dii is 120 watts, and the 300Dii is 300 watts, the 600D packs an amazing 600 watts of LED light. That would be just under 5,000 watts of “old school” light.  In comparison, an ARRI 5K would be just slightly under that amount of light.

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Depth of Field: the ultimate beginner’s guide to controlling depth of field using lens aperture in nature photography

If you are just starting out with photography, you’re learning about plenty of new concepts. Depth of field is one of them. Although it’s one of the essential elements to understand, it can be overwhelming if you’re completely new to it. Therefore, I have come up with the ultimate beginner’s guide to controlling depth of field with lens aperture. While I focus on nature photography, you’ll find this guide handy regardless of the genre you generally shoot. So, let’s get right into it!

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A comprehensive visual guide to equivalent exposure

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If you’re just starting out with photography, the relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed is one of the crucial things to learn. However, it can be difficult to grasp if the concept is new to you. In this great animated video from Apalapse you’ll easily learn the relationship between the three parameters and how they affect the exposure and the look of your images.

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This video teaches you the basics of aperture using Star Wars Lego

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If you’re new to photography, there can be many concepts that still seem overwhelming and confusing. In this video, Aaron Nace of Phlearn explains the basics of aperture to help you grasp the concept and see what the change of aperture does for your shots. But the fun part is: he uses Star Wars Lego (and even Master Yoda’s voice occasionally) to guide you through the theory. I think that it hardly gets more amusing than that.

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25 essential terms that every photographer must know

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Getting used to the sheer number of technical terms and numbers in photography can be pretty overwhelming for beginners. There are a lot of them out there. But you don’t really need to know about all of them from day one. But there are some that you’ll want to learn and understand first.

You’ll hear these terms quite often if you hang around other photographers or partake in any of the photography groups on Facebook. They might confuse you at first, but this video from Apalapse goes through 25 of the most important and breaks down exactly what they mean.

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