If you’ve gone to school for photography, you’ve probably been instructed to shoot at f 8 or f 11 as that typically yields greatest image quality.
It’s just another rule made to be broken.
If you want an overall sharp image where everything is in relative focus, then by all means shoot at those two f-stop settings. But if you’re looking to be a little more creative with your art, realize that the f-stop number, or aperture value, is yours to control, and used with mastery, to create beauty with.
To illustrate this principle I snapped some photos of the cherry blossom trees outside my house. I simply love the bokeh (Japanese for blur) you get while shooting them. Here I have posted three nearly identical images with different f-stop values.
Shot at f 5.6. All these were shot closet to sunset so I didn't have too much light to work with, thus the need to bring it up in post.
Shot at f 4.0
Shot at f 2.8. As you can see this one has the most shallow depth of field.
Disregarding the fact that I had to compromise image quality to brighten up the ones with higher f-stop values, I personally enjoy the bokeh of the first image. You might have a different opinion and that’s fine. One of key things to remember is that before we set goals to please others with our craft, we must be able to honestly say to ourselves that we love what we shoot, that we’re the first ones to feel great and be proud of ourselves for producing something amazing, and that’s not something we should easily let go of because of what somebody else said or because this book said that. In the book of Genesis, God spoke “it was good” in response to his acts of creating the heavens and the earth. No one, not even ourselves, can say we’re not entitled to the same joy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should cast aside all criticism. We just need to bear in mind that when creating art for art’s sake, ours is the opinion that has the most meaning in the end.
So I thought off this series by writing about a common thing I’ve seen people doing with their cameras that does not necessarily serve their best interests: using your on-camera flash.
For the most part, using your on-camera flash is something you want to avoid. The main reason being that it usually results in harsh looking secular highlights on your subject’s face. In layman’s terms, this translates into meaning that the human face, which usually is oily to a certain degree (and therefore reflective like a mirror), will reflect the light coming from the camera flash and the end result is that your subject’s face will have white “hot spots” on it, usually these spots are most pronounced on the nose, forehead, and the hair as well.
Now for most people this isn’t the problem. I myself did not even notice those hot spots until I read up on it, and until now you probably have not have noticed it either. But if any of this rings a bell for you, I now challenge you to rely more on ambient light (all the light around you) instead of your on-camera flash. There’s a reason why camera manufacturers like Canon and Nikon sell external camera flashes as high as $500: the on-camera flash produces unattractive lighting. And it’s not just with a person’s face, next time you take a picture with your on-camera flash, notice how much brighter the foreground object (or whatever object that receives the most light from the flash) and compare how bright it is to the background: usually it’s a lot brighter. Now on occasion you might prefer this rather than having an image in which everything is naturally lit, but from my experience, natural light usually looks better.
Of course, I should be fair as well. For users of point & shoot cameras, often we find ourselves in situations in which we’re forced to use the on-camera flash otherwise we end up getting a blurry picture caused by camera shake. You might, however, be able to compensate by bumping up the ISO, which will result in a brighter picture without having to sacrifice to a slower shutter speed. The price, however, is that your image will look more grainy as a high ISO usually results in more “noise”. In my experience, your picture should still look pretty decent if you can keep the ISO level at 400 or less.
In the end it’s up to you to decide what you want, a picture that uses camera flash or a picture lit by natural (or ambient) light but with more noise.
