#F stop list full#
#F stop list series#

If yo u opened it up wide, you would flood the sensor and your photo would just be a big blob of white. The thought being that you don't need a very big opening to let in all that light. In simple terms, if there is a lot of light outside, lets say you are standing on a white sand beach at noon, then you would set your aperture to maybe f16. If you set your camera at f16, you are only letting that aperture open up to a tiny hole. If you set your camera at f2.8, you are opening that aperture up wide. So what do they mean? As I mentioned above, the smaller the number the wider that opening or aperture opens in your lens.

#F stop list series#

No matter how you slice it, the series of numbers runs from around f1.4 to f32.

#F stop list full#

You will see different variations of this list depending on whether your camera is listing them as full f-stops or half or in third stops. Here is a list of the most common f-stop settings you will see on most cameras: However, there is a thing tied to aperture and it is called depth of field (explained in a different article) and that does come into play with sports photography.īefore we go into that, let's go over th ose f-stop settings. So what are these f-stop numbers and why do you need to understand them? If you were just OK with setting your camera in a full automatic mode and taking what the camera gives you, you are right, it really doesn't matter. For our sake, just know that the hole gets larger and smaller depending on how you set your aperture in the camera menu. These all have a very technical signification and if you are the kind of person who enjoys technical minutia, you can find all kinds of information on the web as to how it all works. The bigger the f-stop number, the smaller the aperture opening, and the smaller the f-stop number, the larger the aperture opening. Note that the f-stop numbers are noted in a backward progression. The aperture is the opening itself and the f-stop is the corresponding number to those openings. You will become familiar with these f-stop numbers and soon they will become second nature. In order to tell the aperture how wide to open and close, the photo world uses another set of mathematical numbers to equal those values. So now instead of turning a ring on the outside of the lens, you simply make the adjustment within the digital settings menu on the camera body sending a message to the aperture mechanism within the lens which widens or narrows that opening accordingly. When cameras became digital and more electronic, that manipulation of the aperture was made electronic too. When I was first shooting photos, you could hold up a lens to the light, look through one end, turn the aperture ring on the outside of the lens and see that opening get smaller or larger.

Where is that spigot or aperture mechanism? Is it in the camera body? Actually it is in the lens. If the spigot (aperture) is small, you are limiting the light that passes through. If the spigot (aperture) is wide, you are letting in a lot of light. You can think of aperture or f-stops as a water spigot. When that shutter opens up, is it exposing the digital sensor to a pin point of light or a flood of light? That is what aperture controls - the quantity of light.

Aperture on the other hand is the apparatus that controls how much light is being let into the camera. However, speed is only part of the equation. In the last article we talked about what a camera shutter does and how Shutter Speed controls the amount of time the shutter opens to let the light hit the digital sensor. It is the dance of these three elements that control the look of your photographs. Welcome back to our four part series about the basic camera settings that every photographer needs to understand.