Episode: 2513
Title: HPR2513: Why I choose Aperture first
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2513/hpr2513.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:27:57

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This is HPR episode 2,513 entitled, Why I Choose Aperture First.
It is hosted by David Whitman and in about 12 minutes long and currently in a clean flag.
The summary is, David Whitman encourages you to choose Aperture as the most important setting
in setting up your cam.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honest Host.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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David Whitman here from beyond the end of the Oregon Trail.
Today I'm going to tell you why I use Aperture as the beginning point for setting my camera
for taking pictures.
I'm not a professional.
My folder on the internet is bad photos by Dave and I always say it's not my fault if
I get a good picture, don't blame me.
There are three things in the exposure triangle to consider when you're setting your camera.
Now there's many more settings in your camera.
These three things are the most important or the starting point and they are shutter speed,
which is how long the shutter is open, aperture, which is how largely opening is in the lens
when you snap the photograph and the ISO which is the sensitivity of the recording media
or film.
On a DSLR camera, you can easily change these settings very quickly.
The ISO is interesting, you can be changed, you used to have to change film to get a faster
film but now you can just change the ISO.
So I choose Aperture to begin my photograph or to begin setting my photograph up because
it gives the depth of field, it controls the depth of field.
And the larger the opening is in the camera, the less of the picture will be in focus.
In other words, there's a depth of field around your subject.
The background, if you have a large opening in the lens, the background will be blurred and
the foreground will be slightly blurred and you can get a good, make the subject that
you're taking a picture of, like in my case, to be a dog, you can get that to be the focal
point of the picture, the rest of the picture you're considering.
Not important, it is important because it's background, but it's not as important as
the subject matter, which in this case would be a running dog with a duck in its mouth
or a leaping dog or a dog just jumping into the water.
So I start out there with the aperture.
Now, apertures are measured in stops, stops are two times.
So 1.4 to 2 is two times more in the aperture range.
This has to do with, I think, the square root of 2, which is 1 point, but the approximate
square root of 2, which is 1.414, I think, anyhow, it has to do with a circle.
So every time you have a stop, it's going to be two times, you know, the difference
of two times.
And so three stops is going to be eight times difference.
So if you went from 1.4 to 2.0 to 2.8, I think you'd have eight times difference.
And it changes the depth of field, but the aperture also allows the light in.
So when you choose your aperture, if you're going to have a blurred out subject, you're
going to have to adjust the shutter speed in order to let the light, enough light into
the camera to get that balance there to get the picture look good and or change the ISO
sensitivity.
So the first thing I'll do is set my aperture up, shoot some test shots if you're unaware
of what the background is going to look like because it can make a lot of difference.
You know, you don't want to always shoot wide open where you have just a subject in focus
and the background is blurred.
Sometimes they get dizzy looking, especially like when I take pictures of a dog in the
grassy field where there's a lot of dried, you know, tall grass and you're shooting, getting
a picture of a golden retriever or a yellow lab.
And maybe there's some green in there can be sort of psychedelic looking.
So I might, you know, decrease the opening size of the aperture in order to get more of
that in focus so it doesn't just look so weird.
So then I'm going to have to make a choice on my ISO sensitivity.
The most important thing to understand here is that there is a point where the ISO sensitivity
is going to be bad.
If you get it too sensitive, it just won't make a very good looking picture.
It'll be kind of blotchy looking.
So try to avoid that by keeping the ISO sensitivity as low as possible.
But of course, now I'm shooting for a moving animal that's moving, hopefully at high speed,
you know, some dogs run really, really fast and some aren't so fast.
In fact, a golden retriever has a lot different gate than a yellow or brown or chocolate, yellow
chocolate or black Labador.
And the pictures turn out a lot different because of the gate.
But that means that you're going to have to adjust your shutter speed in order to get
the stop motion on that dog and get it to show up nice and clear.
And you can play with the shutter speed, you know, to make it look, you know, put the
dog in motion panel on with it.
In general, I'll set the aperture, get my ISO sensitivity, set where I want it, or put
it in auto if I have a lot of variability in my scene.
And then I will adjust my shutter speed.
Now the reality of shooting pictures where you're having a basically sports photography,
for me is I will shoot in what's called aperture priority mode where I lock the aperture
in.
It's called AV on a Canon camera.
And you set it in there.
And then my shutter speed will vary according to what the camera thinks it needs, you know,
the computer in there.
And then the ISO will be set or if it's very, very variable.
There's a lot of variability.
I'll set the ISO on sensitivity, on auto sensitivity, so the auto ISO and it'll adjust.
Now the better cameras, you can adjust the shutter speed to where it has, it only goes
so slow like many times when I'm shooting a dog, I will go with one and one thousandths
of a second for my shutter speed, I don't, that'll be my minimum shutter speed.
And that's because if it's any slower than that, the dog will be blurred.
And then I will set my ISO a lot of times to, if I have it on auto, I know my camera takes
good pictures at 3200 ISO or it can.
Sometimes they're not all that great, but so I will set the ceiling there.
So knowing your camera controls is really important.
Being rich I think is probably a good photographer and I know Gorkhan is just from hearing them
talk on some of the shows I've heard.
So for me, I just set that aperture up first and I understand that that's going to give
me what the background is going to look like, how much of the picture will be in focus.
And it's a hell of a lot of fun to go out and take pictures and it's also just a lot
of fun to go out and instead of going out, I mean I'm not opposed to hunting an animal
or anything, but just to get out in the woods and places and just take pictures of things
and try to set the shot up.
It's really, really interesting hobby and you can do a lot with the pictures and then
of course I'm going to suggest you use the Gimp and maybe Inkscape, you know, to do your
editing and stuff and I've been using a little bit of DigiCam.
Certainly is a complicated, can be a complicated hobby to have, can be pretty simple to and
quite satisfying, but I encourage you to start out by experimenting, by using aperture
first and then adjusting the shutter speed and the ISO to get yourself in place to get
a good picture.
One of the interesting exercises that I've done is, you know, they encourage you to learn
how to shoot in manual with your camera and I'd say this is a good way to go.
Not that you wouldn't use aperture priority or shutter priority, but when you learn
how to set the camera up in manual, you get a good idea of what things go with the other
things and take some pictures of some interesting objects around your place.
Now, David Dott Whitman is my name on Instagram and I've got a picture of the African, I
said it because they're African and Queen, but it's not.
It's the River Queen, a boat that is, it's being torn down now and scrapped, but it's still,
but it's not going to be there for long.
It's at Global with the Marina or on the, at a mortgage at Global Oregon on the Columbia
River.
Interestingly enough, there was some, it used to be a floating restaurant in Portland
and my superintendent at the department I work in, so that's where I had a senior prom.
It was there, we lived about 40 miles from Portland and he lived probably 30 miles from
Portland when he went to school, so he had a senior prom there.
I got a nice picture of that and I took a nice lens out and adjusted the, you know, by
shooting in manual with that.
So the photography can be a really nice, interesting hobby.
It can be really time consuming too or it doesn't have to be, but I would encourage
you to use aperture as your starting point for setting your camera up, understand what
it is.
Hey, you know, Wikipedia is great for learning about things, all types of things.
So you can just kind of, you know, do a duck, go to get there, find out some stuff, get
in Wikipedia and search around and then lots of other free information online.
I would encourage you, I think I recorded this so many times, I don't know if I've talked
about the book, Understanding Exposure by Brian Peterson in this take of the episode,
but he has a great book that is fantastic, that tells you how he got certain shots and
he's a professional photographer.
He's an interesting guy too because when you read his book and then if you then jump
over to YouTube and look at what, you know, some of the instructional videos that he has
are there, he doesn't look quite like I thought he would and of course I probably don't
look quite like you think I do either.
You never believe I was that handsome, to be honest, haha.
So with that, I'm going to sign off here and I would encourage you if you have something
more to add or want to correct an item that I've talked about here about photography.
Please feel free to make another episode and get it in for Hacker Public Radio.
I will say I thoroughly enjoy the show, every contribution that comes in and I really
like listening to the community news and you and Dave do that and I've tried to get
on there and maybe I'll try again, I have something planned, I'll see how it goes.
But I really appreciate that and thanks to Anonasos.com for sponsoring us and for everyone
who's done so much work there, I've learned a lot.
It's just an enjoyable, enjoyable piece of work, Hacker Public Radio is.
So I'll be signing off now and hope to hear from you on your own episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
Thank you.
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