Aperture Fun..

Matt asked me what Aperture was when I was explaining the new camera to him.  "It controls how wide the opening to the lens is."  Blank stare.  "It also controls how much depth of field there is and what shutter speed you need to use."  Continued blank stare.  "It also controls how much bokeh there will be"  I lost my audience at this point, so I did a little experiment for him to help explain.  I thought the results were neat, so I replicated it to share here.

The first two shots in this series also do a pretty good job of showing the differences between f/1.4 and f/1.8 - a question that gets pondered a lot since those are the two most popular versions of the 50mm lens.

Thanks to sock monkey for being a perfect model.   I knew my favorite go to models would not be up for this task.  All of these shots were taken with a 50mm f/1.4 lens in late morning with sidelight.  I metered the light off of the monkey's face to get the correct exposure and started at f/1.4.  You can see that for every time I made the aperture opening smaller, I moved the shutter speed the same number of steps so that the exposure remained the same each time, even if the background focus changed.    I like them all up to f/2.5 and then the fence starts getting too much focus and it takes away from the monkey.  Which is your favorite?

f/1.4 - 1/8000 - ISO 100

f/1.8 - 1/5000 - ISO 100

f/2.5 - 1/2500 - ISO 100

f/3.5 - 1/1250 - ISO 100

f/5.6 - 1/500 - ISO 100

f/8.0 - 1/250 - ISO 100

f/11 - 1/125 - ISO 100

I probably should have gone one more advance of a couple of f-stops in my experiment to get a totally focused fence, but Kylie was getting impatient and by the time I realized I stopped short, the lighting had changed so much that I could not recreate it.  It gets my point across and now my husband understands aperture without my technical explanations!