THE IMPORTANCE OF APERTURE

Pro nature photographer Andy Parkinson explains how changing the aperture can make a dramatic difference to your wildlife shots

- Andy Parkinson

One of the greatest mistakes a wildlife photographer – amateur or professional – can make is to disregard the wealth of benefits that can be found by shooting at a wide variety of aperture settings. So often it seems that the pursuit of bokeh, or diffuse surroundings, consumes the imagination, limiting the myriad ways in which individual encounters can be viewed, and, as a result, the diversity of images that can potentially be produced.

The aperture is created by a set of sliding blades in a lens, which control the size of the hole through which light can pass to the sensor. Controlling the size of the hole in your lens might be crucial to making a good exposure, but it also allows you to get creative with sharpness and blur. Large apertures such as f/2.8 cause more of a scene from to be blurred, whereas choosing a higher f-number brings more of a scene into sharp focus.

Over the following pages I’ll show you just what can be achieved by stepping back for a moment and giving every individual opportunity more consideration when it comes to your aperture choice. After a refresher in the basics of what aperture is and how it can be used, we’ll look which situations lend themselves to different apertures, from f/2.8 all the way up to f/32. First, you’ll learn how to shoot dramatic, expansive habitat shots – images that almost look more like paintings, with front-to-back sharpness and filled with detail and narrative, and then you’ll discover how to produce detailed and intimate close-ups that are ethical but texturally rich.

Aperture is one of the single most important camera settings that you have in terms of crafting images – let’s explore together what can be achieved.