Aperture Settings

"There is one golden rule when setting aperture, almost always you will want the highest possible setting - ie F8 to F22"

When that comment first appeared in this article reproduced at K2climb.net, several people wrote in disagreeing with it. Perhaps they have found better ways to secure consistency in sharpness of images, but after 10 years and many thousands of rolls of film, the practise of setting high apertures has rewarded me with images more crisp than any other regular method I have investigated for delivering sharp pictures.

As we are all aware, or certainly should be, setting a high aperture gives greater depth of field, enabling us to keep a greater maxim of the content of the frame in focus. If you do this consistently your images will be sharper and have a higher degree of viewing impact. The wider your aperture (ie F1.4 - F6 etc), the more smooth the edges of the subjects, at its farthest extension, your images will be soft and 'muddy'. The smaller the aperture, the sharper the image. This holds true for imagery from near the minimum focal length to that at the infinite point. This is more specific of course to shooting landscapes and cultural scenes - you wouldn't or couldn't use a high aperture to sneak that shot in of a snow leopard from 35m under a cloudy sky, there likely wouldn't be enough light to allow a blur free image.

I regularly set my camera on AP (aperture priority) then swing the aperture down until my shutter speed is no slower than the focal length of my lens. So the second part of this rule is to never handhold a camera shot when your shutter speed is slower than the lens' focal length - ie, you have set your F stop (aperture) to F12 and your camera has computed a shutter speed of 1/15th second. But you are using a 35mm lens, so that means you are not going to get a good shot (blurred). You really need a shutter speed of around 1/40th or faster. You can drop your aperture a stop or two, and that will increase your shutter speed, or you can place your camera on a rock or tripod and shoot.

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