2022 Weekly Photo Challenge
Week 5: Smaller Aperture
Welcome to a new year of weekly photography challenges! For the month of January, our first few weekly challenges will focus on somewhat more technical aspects of controlling your camera.
Last week’s challenge dealt with keeping your camera’s aperture as wide open as possible, letting in more light and yielding a shallower depth of field. This week, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to swing the pendulum the other direction to use a maximum aperture of f/8, preferably f/10 or smaller.
If a wider aperture lets more light into the camera, then you can probably guess what happens when you tighten up the aperture…less light and potentially darker images. This can be particularly useful when shooting extremely bright subjects, such as the sunrise in the first sample image. In this case, the small aperture, fast shutter speed, and low ISO sensitivity all combine to keep most of the sunrise from “blowing out” the sky, and at the same time keeping the foreground objects as darker silhouettes.
And just as with the wider end of the aperture spectrum, using a smaller aperture can have a significant effect on your image’s depth of field. Generally speaking, the smaller your aperture, the greater depth of field you will find in your images. This is commonly used in landscape photography:
Eric Culver Photography 