From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 2)

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Lens speed

Lens speed

From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 2)

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Lens speed

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- When it comes photography, the word speed can be very confusing because it refers to so many different things. There's shutter speed, the ISO is considered a measure of the speed of your image sensor. You might refer to the speed of your camera's burst shooting mode. As mentioned earlier, your lens also has a speed. When we refer to the speed of a lens we're talking about the widest aperture that it can open to. I've got three lenses here. They don't all open the same amount. I can't get them all as wide as each other. All lenses work this way and you can figure out how wide a lens will go by looking for some certain markings. This is a 24-70 millimeter zoom lens. If I look on the front ring here, I see 24-70 millimeters, so that tells me the focal length range of the lens. Right next to it it says... There's a ratio listed, it says 1:2.8. 2.8 is the widest aperture that this lens can be opened to. That's actually a very nice fast lens. 2.8 is going to give me some pretty shallow…

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