Food Photography

Understanding Aperture & Settings

You bought a super pro camera and the case-scenario is “help me I bought an over-the-top iPhone!”

Great! Now that you’ve invested a lot of time and money purchasing a good SLR camera, the big question is: how can you take great shots with your new awesome camera? If you are like me, you’ve scrutinized every single detail of the most stunning shots you saw from your favorite food bloggers, and found out that they all follow some basic rules. Natural lighting? Check! Dish composition and styling? Check! Pro camera? Check! Creativity? I’m getting there… listen if Michelangelo spent four months carefully observing a piece of marble in his studio to finally craft the statue of David, give me approximately 10 to 12 years to accomplish the same!

My point is… having a great pro camera, unfortunately, does not immediately translate into amazing shots. I actually find the “auto” setting options of my Canon 40D worse even than some new small cameras like Lumix FZ200. Off course there were some negative aspects to having an SLR-like camera, for instance, sensors are so small that you can have a lot of trouble shooting at night or in low light. Also, it’s hard to play with depth-of-field with a small lens. I think one of the reasons professionals love SLR camera lenses is precisely because they can control the depth-of-field of their shots (meaning that your subject will be in focus and the background will have this “blurred” effect as in the picture below).

You learned how to play with your camera settings and the case-scenario is “how can I become the Annie Leibovitz of food photography?”

It took me a while to comfortably play around with the settings of my camera and until today I don’t feel that I’ve ever used in its full capacity. However, manipulating your aperture settings is one of those things you can do right way. For food photography, it’s important to get the whole “depth-of-field” game right. So, the aperture plays a huge role in defining how your food pictures will look. In plain english, aperture refers to the opening size of your camera lens at the moment you take a picture. Aperture has a direct effect on your depth of field. The relation can be described as follows: the smaller the aperture, the more extensive the depth-of-field. So a large aperture will decrease depth-of-field whereas a small aperture will give you larger depth-of-field.

It may sound strange, but think of aperture as something that is actually blocking the light from entering your camera. If you have a bigger aperture number, you’ll have less light. Decreasing the aperture value does in fact increase the amount of light you get.

Here’s what the aperture of a camera actually looks like… with some f-stop values:

Aperture is measured in f-stop numbers, aka, fancy numbers. So, f8 means that your aperture is more closed than f2. Every lens has a range for its f-stop values, check the front of the camera it usually says something like f:2.8–11 [this means that the lowest value of this lens is 2.8 and the highest is 11]. When you look at your camera settings, try to decrease that number to a minimum level. I usually take my shots with an aperture f1.8 (i.e. very open).

The best way to learn all of this is by going out and taking a series of shots with different aperture settings. If it’s too cold outside, and I utterly feel for you on this one, let your imagination guide you. In my case, this means buying fruits, making a smoothie, snapping a little, and most importantly, finishing it off drinking something delicious.