Aperture

What is aperture?

Aperture is the size of the hole in the lens that is being shot through and the smaller or larger it is allows different amounts of light through, it works in a similar way to the human eye where the pupil will expand in dark places and shrink in light except that the user has manual control over the aperture in a camera. Aperture can create a level of depth of field in the camera and can be used to blur the background of a scene and keep the subject in focus. Aperture can completely change a shot by either giving it depth or by limiting it's depth which can have a big impact on how the audience views a room.

F-stop/F-number?

F-stop is the number that is presented to the user when they change the size of the lens aperture on the camera it appears as the F-number on the camera and will follow a similar trend to 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8 , 11 etc. The size of the aperture is calculated like fractions as it is how much of the light entering the camera or how little. The F in f-stop stands for focal length so overall you are viewing the focal length at differing amounts depending on what you choose.

The following is a video of F/8

You can notice that the video blurs what is outside the window rather that capturing it all solid. this is due to the aperture being able to show the depth of focus from behind the book. If the video was taken in F/2.8 or F/5 the Trees in the window would be less blurry or sharp.