Photography Basics: Shooting in Aperture Priority

Photography Basics: Shooting in Aperture Priority

For someone just starting out in the art of photography, much like Ann and I, there is a massive amount of information on the technique of shooting photos. There are also plenty of tutorials that are dedicated to the subject in a step by step fashion. You can read plenty of articles and guides, but there are only a few things that you really need to know before you can start taking great pictures. Now, we definitely consider ourselves beginners, but after we learned these 3 basic concepts, it all makes so much sense now!

1. Aperture

Aperture is defined by webster's as "the opening in a photographic lens that admits the light."
Aperture is also the main controller of depth of focus.

Depth of focus basically means, how much of the background is in focus. Because of the way the optics in the lens are set up, the larger the aperture, the smaller the depth of focus. Conversely, the smaller the aperture, the larger the depth of focus, meaning more things will be in focus in the background of the subject you're shooting!

So, as aperture increases, things in the background get blurrier, and vice versa.
Lenses typically describe the aperture settings by their "f-stop". A low f-stop means a high aperture.
Lower f-stops give you better depth of focus, as well as give you more flexibility for low-light settings.

Here are a few photos with different aperture settings:

f/14 low aperture

f/4 high aperture

2. ISO

ISO is short for international standards organization. When referring to the ISO setting of a camera, it basically means how sensitive the image sensor is at a particular setting.
The higher the number, the more sensitive the image sensor is to light, thus requiring less light to expose the picture.

High ISO numbers:
- Good for dark settings, action shots indoors
- Bad for outside photography and also noticeably grainy

Low ISO numbers:
- Good for outdoor shooting, much softer in contrast to higher numbers
- Bad for low light settings

Here are a few photos with different ISO settings:

High ISO - 1600

Low ISO - 100

3. Exposure Compensation

The only other thing you should worry about when shooting in aperture priority is the exposure. Typically while shooting, we will leave it at 0.0 and take a few test shots to see if we need to adjust it up or down. A good way to check is to view the histogram of the photo. If either of the ends of the histogram are hitting the top of the graph, most likely it's under or overexposed.