Bonsai photography - controlling your exposure - aperture

You can control the exposure (how bright or dark your image is) of your bonsai photograph by adjusting several factors.

Three of the main factors you can control on the camera are;

1. Camera Aperture
2. Camera Shutter speed
3. Camera ISO Speed

There are other factors that affect exposure you can sometimes control, depending on the environment including;

1. Light intensity, how bright your lighting is if indoors, or how you modify the light if you use natural lighting.

In this section I will cover aperture.

Aperture

What is aperture. Aperture is a number representing the size of the whole in the lense that lets the light through.

You can modify the size of the aperture.

The smaller the number, the larger the amount of light that comes in.

The larger the aperture number, the less amount of light that comes in through the lense.

The aperture number is also referred to the F-stop number.  example f2.8

How Aperture affects exposure

The higher the number the darker the image (example f11 or f22)

How Aperture affects depth-of-field

Aperture directly affects the amount of the photo which is in focus. A simple example might be if you had 15 trees in a line leading away from you and you were photographing that line of trees you can choose whether you want one tree in focus and all the trees behind and in front of that tree out of focus, a narrow depth of field. Or you can choose to see a group of trees next to each other in focus in that line, in other words a greater depth of field.

A narrow depth of field is gained by a smaller aperture number e.g. f2.8

A larger depth of field is achieved by a larger aperture number e.g. f22.