This post assumes you’re working with some sort of DSLR camera. My hope is that understanding how to use aperture correctly will help you take some awesome photos that you wanna brag about. Aperture does that to all of us. Enjoy!

THE 3 PILLARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography stands on three big pillars: ISO, shutter speed, and aperture.

Each has its own role to determine artistic effects, color clarity, and basically overall image quality. All three pillars revolve around light.

ISO & SHUTTER SPEED

• ISO controls the exposure of your photo by determining how fast the camera takes in light and shutter speed helps determine the length of time that your camera absorbs light.
• Low ISO will take in less light but also creates less noise, higher ISO will take in more light faster, but give you more noise.
• Slow shutter speeds give your camera more time to take in light for a brighter photo.

APERTURE

Aperture is a little bit different from the other two. It’s still relevant to light, but it is more about focus than brightness level.

Once you understand aperture you can create photos that look more professional, even if they’re just family snapshots.

UNDERSTANDING F-STOP

In many respects, aperture acts the same way as the pupil of your eye. A wider aperture means more light, and a smaller aperture limits the amount of light. In photography terms, aperture is measured in something called the f-stop scale. A low f-stop would be f/4, while a high f-stop would be f/22.

It’s important to remember that a smaller number means wider aperture. I always have to think twice about that because it seems counterintuitive to me.

When you change the aperture, you are actually trying to manipulate the camera’s depth of field. It’s generally accepted that a good camera (or lens) is one that offers wider aperture (lower f-stop numbers). You’ll notice that there are some very expensive lenses out there, and for many, the extra price is directly related to the f-stop ability.

SOME USES FOR APERTURE IN EVERYDAY PRACTICAL PHOTOGRAPHY ARE AS FOLLOWS:

f/1.4 – very wide aperture to allow more light in a short amount of time; best used in low lighting condition if you don’t have a tri-pod. At this level, the camera can focus on a VERY specific small area in the frame to create a blurred background or soft focus effect.

f/2.8 – an f/2.8 is widely used in blurred-background portrait photography without compromising details of facial features.

f/4 – under decent (but not great) lighting, f/4 is the recommended aperture for portrait photography. At this level, the camera can focus on a wider area of the frame to bring up the details of overall posture.

f/8 – when taking photographs of a large group of people, bigger f-stop numbers helps you focus on everything in the frame.

f/16 – when under a bright light or for landscapes. In most cases, a blurred background is impossible to achieve at this level.

CHECK OUT THESE EXAMPLE PHOTOS USING DIFFERENT F-STOPS

The easiest way to learn about using aperture is to set your camera in Aperture Priority mode (Av or A on your dial). This mode puts you in charge of the aperture, and the camera does most of the other work, like shutter speed, automatically.

Could be awesome. Could be a disaster. We’ll see, and I’m planning to post the results (unless they’re horribly embarrassing) so stay tuned for that gem.

I just happened to try out lightning photography over the weekend because of a chance opportunity. It was pretty rad, so I’m hoping photographing fireworks will be too.

I’ve been putting a little research into the photo gear and settings I’m gonna use and I thought I’d share them before the celebrations get started in case anyone else wanted to try it out too.

THE GEAR:

A tripod – I’m planning to take fairly long exposures so a tripod is a MUST. Otherwise the fireworks are gonna be super shaky.

Spare batteries – I cannot tell you how much it sucks to run out of batteries when you’re having an awesome time taking photos. Extras batteries are essential, and make sure they’re charged!

Spare memory cards – Same deal as the batteries! I always pack a few memory cards with me in case I run out of room on my first one.

A remote – I have both a wireless remote and a wired one. I think I’m going to try using the wireless one since the wired one might shake the camera. But either will probably be fine.

Wide-angle lens – My widest lens is the standard 18-50mm. So I’m going to use that unless I can possibly borrow an even wider lens from someone else.

CAMERA SETTINGS FOR SHOOTING FIREWORKS:

Shooting mode

Bulb. If you’re not sure why you want to use bulb for fireworks photography? The answer is really simple: bulb mode lets you keep the shutter open as long as you want. AKA you can take suuuuper long exposures. Some people keep it open for hours to get those awesome star trail shots.

I’ll probably just be keeping it open for a few seconds, but since I’ll be using a remote, I’ll probably use Bulb.

Aperture

I’m planning to start with an aperture (f-stop) of 8 and see how that looks. I might go up to 14, but I don’t think any higher than that.

Higher aperture does mean darker photos though, so if the photos are too bright, I might have to use a high aperture to dim it.

Shutter speed

Like I mentioned, I’m planning to do a long exposure. I think I’ll be starting off with 5 seconds, and just experiment to see what longer exposures – maybe up to 1 minute – look like.

The issue with doing longer exposures is that it will make the photos brighter, and might actually overexpose them with the lights from town around the fireworks.

The cool thing about long exposures is that it’ll make the fireworks look all smooth and pretty.

ISO

I want to keep the ISO at 100 if I can, and I sorta think that will work great. Since I’m more worried about overexposure than underexposure, the low ISO should be perfect – plus it’s going to produce the highest quality photos!

High ISO = More noise

Low ISO = Less noise/cleaner photos

White balance

I talked a little about using white balance to change the color of photos in this post but I’m not sure if I’m going to be messing with that too much for firework photos since the fireworks have their own distinct colors. I don’t really want to change the original colors of the fireworks, so I might try auto white balance and see how that works.