Aperture

Alright, label me all you want, OCD, ADD, ADHD you name it I must have it.  Or, any combination of the group.  I am totally obsessed with learning real photography right now.  I have grown up with a Father who went though the same phase a few decades ago so it must be hereditary.  So, bear with me, I am going to document the process.  Tonight I worked on learning about aperture.  Here is a brief, non-technical explanation from the Jenny Joy Photography Blog.

Your aperture or f-stop setting contributes to how much light is allowed in to your lens. Picture yourself on a bright sunny day locked in a room with no artificial light, all the walls painted black and no windows. Pitch black. Get the idea? Now, imagine the difference in the amount of light allowed into that room with a porthole vs. a peephole. That is what your aperture setting does. It determines how much light is allowed to reach your image sensor (or film if you’re not shooting digital).

Here’s where it can get even trickier to understand. The smaller the f-stop, the larger the aperture size. The larger the f-stop, the smaller the aperture size. Again, my caveat on this entire explanation is that I am not trying to give you a master’s class or a deep technical understanding of photography concepts. So, let’s just cut to the chase and show you one of the most important practical uses of aperture; establishing a shallow depth of field (wide aperture) so that the background is out of focus drawing more attention and focus to the subject of interest.

More than anything I really wanted to figure out how to take a picture of a person or object and have the background slightly out of focus.  Now because of the ADD I have a really hard time sitting down with a book and reading about all the different f-stops and such.  But I buckled down and after some playing around, this is what I got.  

On a side note, please ignore the dust on table.  I wish I could become a little more OCD about house cleaning. And, I am neither ADD or OCD I just wish I had a acronym to explain my weird behavior.