Week 3

Happy Hearts

70.0 mm 1/15s f/2.8 ISO 200 

For this week's photo challenge, I wanted to teach Ariana a little about aperture and what it does.  The wider the aperture the more light that is let in and the faster the shutter speed. This creates the silky smooth bokeh (pronounced as boke or boke-uh).  Boken is a Japanese word and refers to the blur of an image, "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light," (photojpn.org/words/len.html).  The smaller the aperture the slower the shutter speed.  Using a small aperture is perfect for landscape shots when you want the whole image in focus.

For this shot I set up a mirror and borrowed some of Julia's candy hearts.  Then we secured the camera to the tripod and I showed Ariana how to take pictures in aperture priority mode.  She used several different apertures when she taking her shots.  She got to see that when she used a large aperture like a f/5 only one or two hearts were in focus.  When she decreased the aperture to f/8, four to five were in focus.  At f/16, even more were in focus.  And at f/22 all the hearts were in focus.

This was the easiest way to teach her because she got to see the pictures at the different settings.  Depending on the settings that are chooses your picture will look different.  When you are composing a shot you need to think about what you are trying to achieve.  For this heart picture I thought it looked more interesting having only a couple of the candies in focus.

Happy Valentine's Day!