From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 1)
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The aperture
From the course: Photography Foundations: Exposure (part 1)
The aperture
- So you've seen how the shutter is used by your camera to control the amount of that strikes the image sensor. Now, let's take a look at the aperture. The aperture sits in your lens not your camera. It's an iris composed of interlocking metal blades. Here's a lens, watch what happens as the iris is opened and closed. The blades slide back and forth, and as the do so, the hole in the middle gets bigger or smaller. Now, obviously a bigger hole allows more light to pass through, while a smaller hole allows less. More light means a brighter image, so as with shutter speed, you can use the aperture to control how bright your image is. The size of the whole in the aperture is specified using a measure called f-stop. It's a number that refers to the ratio of the size of the aperture, to the length of the lens. Now, don't worry, that is not something you need to think about when you're shooting. All you need to know is that each specific aperture size is denoted with an f-stop number. So…
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