Learning aperture photography is essential to becoming a great photographer. Aperture controls how much light enters your lens and hits your sensor for creating images; so understanding it is an integral part of learning your manual camera settings.

Aperture is a circular opening in your camera lens with blades that overlap, and the larger they overlap, the wider your aperture becomes, which lets you control how much light passes through to your sensor. Think of it like the pupil of your eye: when darkness falls upon us, our pupil widens so more light enters our retina; but as soon as brightness hits again, our pupil contracts back down again limiting exposure.

Adjusting the aperture (or f-stop setting) has several effects on your photographs, perhaps most obviously its impact on brightness. As aperture size expands, so too will images as lens hole diameter increases and increases light entering through lens openings.

Aperture can also help you add creative effects to your photographs by controlling depth of field. Depending on the camera and lens used, aperture allows you to control depth of field in various ways: wide apertures can blur backgrounds into shallow focus effects commonly known as “bokeh”, while smaller ones create deep depth of field effects – these methods will give greater creative control of your photos! Getting acquainted with various apertures will provide greater creative control over them all!