Breaking Down Aperture: Part 1- Blurry Backgrounds!

So you LOVE those pictures with those blurry backgrounds.



Take this photograph as an example. The sunflower is in focus and the background is blurry. This is what is called low depth of field. This is accomplished with a aperture (also known as an f-stop) of 1 all the way to 3 or 4 f-stop. The lower the number, the blurrier the background.

This is a perfect example I found from TeenyTinyTurkey's flickr account:


So you see, the f-stop of 1.8 has a blurry background while an f-stop of 20 has more things in focus. (F-20 is called High Depth of field).

Another example of High Depth of Field:




Now for your camera to achieve this, manually at least, you need to be able to change the Aperture Setting. Every camera is different, for example: Canon's aperture setting is labeled AV while Nikon and Sony is just A.

When you figure out how to change the aperture, you will then be able to make photographs with blurry backgrounds.

If your camera does not have an aperture setting you can change, you may be able to find some sort of setting like Portrait or something with a low number aperture.

There is so much more than just that, and I'll be getting more into aperture in my next post. But just experiment with your camera. Read your manual! It's very important to know what your camera does! (You paid for those settings, so use it!)

Photography is about experimenting! Have fun :)


(Btw these photographs were taken by me and the black and white one with my Canon film ESO camera and the color was taken by my Canon T1i.)