Introduction to Aperture in Digital Photography. Photography Tutorial - A Lesson on Apertures. One of the questions I’m most often asked about photography is how I get that “blurry background” in pictures. And the answer is simple – it has to do with the aperture. Chances are you’ve heard of apertures. And if you’re anything like me when I first got my camera, you have no clue what that means or how it’s related to your photography. In fact, I can remember totally giving up on trying to learn about apertures one day because I couldn’t keep my terms straight and it all didn’t make sense.
In photography, aperture refers to the amount of light the lens lets in. Now, the smaller the aperture, say f/22, the greater the depth of field will be. To demonstrate what I mean, I took a series of pictures of the same flower but with different apertures. F/1.4 f/2.8 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 f/15 f/20 Can you see the different in blurriness of the background? Now it’s your turn. But since I have a Canon DSLR, I’ll show you how to change the aperture on that. So now the only thing left to do is experiment!