your aperture and changing your focus point

Remember aperture? If not, check out my definitions page. It’s the opening in your lens that allows you to do two things. One, it allows more light in and two, it controls your depth of field (how much is going to be sharply in focus in the background.

These two pictures below are taken at the aperture (also known as f stop) of 2.2. That means the hole in my lens is open up really wide, the hole is big. So, my depth of field behind my subject is shallow, creating a blurry background. The background is not sharply in focus. Right? So that’s a shallow depth of field. Make sense? These two pictures were taken with the same settings but a different focus point. When taking the picture on the left I focused on my little boy’s eyes. In the picture on the right I didn’t change any of my settings, but instead I focused on the donut. :)

My manual settings for this shot were:
ISO – 800 (inside the donut shop)
aperture – 2.2 (open pretty wide open for light and for a very shallow depth of field)
shutter speed – 1/250 second