Trying to get into photography. How and why does aperture affect focus?
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The aperture is a hole which lets light into the camera. The bigger it is, the more light can come in.
A smaller aperture means that a greater amount of things will be in focus (a larger depth of field). A pinhole camera has no lens, but a tiny pinhole sized aperture, so everything still is in focus, despite the lack of a lens.
That is because the smaller the aperture, the less different directions the light will be coming from.
However, you still want to let in enough light to get a photo! So if you make the aperture smaller, you will need to have the aperture open for a longer amount of time (a longer shutter speed).
Having a small aperture and a long shutter speed lets you have a greater focal length (the distance between the nearest and furthest away thing which will be in focus). But anything which moves will become blurry.
Having a large aperture and a short shutter speed will let you have a small focal length, so you can have effects like a crisp portrait with the background blurred. It will also allow you to freeze anything that is moving so that it isn’t blurred.
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