Lesson: Aperture

1) VIDEO LESSON & RESPONSE QUESTIONS

2) CAMERA SIMULATOR Exercises

3) PRACTICE SHOOT

Aperture, as demonstrated by a cat:

(Source: @Reza D Sadeghian)

1) VIDEO LESSON

When asked by your teacher, please find Lesson: Aperture on Classroom. You can answer the questions based on the video below (it's also embedded in the Google form).

2) CAMERA SIMULATOR Exercises

Here is a link to an interactive camera simulator. For today's purposes, be sure to set it to aperture priority mode.

https://www.camerasim.com/original-camerasim

After playing around with this for a minute, try the following two challenges along with your teacher. For each of the two images below, copy the settings shown into your simulator window, and then try to "fix" the settings to get the result asked for.

Challenge 1:

In-focus portrait with shallow depth of field.

(Pretend this is your cousin's birthday and you want to feature her as the subject. The background is less important, so you want it blurred.)

Challenge 2:

Properly exposed scene. Extended depth of field, everything in focus.

(Pretend that a new playground opened in your community and you want this photo to go on the front page of the community newsletter. It's important that we see lots of the playground and that it's largely in focus.)

3) PRACTICE SHOOTING IN "A" (APERTURE PRIORITY) MODE

For the remainder of class, grab your camera, find somewhere as bright as possible, and experiment shooting at different F-stop values. Low aperture values (e.g. f/6.3 or lower) gives you shallower depth of field (but lets in more light), and higher aperture values (e.g. f/11 or higher) gives you more extended depth of field (but takes in much less light).

At the end of class, ask yourself what challenges you had, particularly with F/22 or higher. (Hint: were your photos blurry?)

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