What Aperture Should I Use With My Camera?
Aperture, along with shutter speed and ISO, is one of the three most important settings you control when you take a photo. It affects both the amount of light that hits your camera sensor and the depth of field of your images. Let’s look at how to pick the right aperture for a given image.
RELATED: What Is Aperture?
Wide Apertures: f/1.2-f/2.8
Any aperture wider than f/2.8 is really wide. Most fast prime lenses have an aperture of f/1.8, although some have an aperture of f/1.4 or even f/1.2. A very small handful of rare lenses have even wider apertures like f/0.95!
These wide apertures have two main uses: to let in a lot of light for night sky photography and to create a shallow depth of field for portraits.
Which use you’re going for really depends on your lens. A wide angle wide aperture lens is much more suited to astrophotography while a fast telephoto lens will take great portraits.
Mid-Wide Apertures: f/2.8-f/5.6
