When you first take your camera off auto, it’s easy to feel daunted and think that you’re going to have to change your settings for every shot you take - but actually that's not the case, especially if you’re using aperture priority.
In normal daylight, if you’re just taking general scenery shots without any specific artistic effect, and where none of the elements are close to the camera, then a ‘middling’ aperture will do the job nicely – and at this aperture, your shutter speed will usually be fast enough to hand hold as well, unless it's a very dull day.
So unless you’re wanting to try any artistic effects such as a blurry background or freezing the action, you can actually leave your camera on a set of average settings, and go out for a whole day without having to change them too much at all if you don’t want to. The difference is that you have the knowledge to make that judgment for each shot, and change the settings if you have to - for example if light levels are low.
The right ‘mid-point’ aperture for your camera varies depending on the size of your sensor, as follows:
APS-C Sensor
f10
Micro Four Thirds Sensor
f8
Full Frame Sensor
f11
1” Sensor
f5.6
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1/2.3” Sensor
f4.5
I’d recommend setting this aperture to begin with, as you walk out the door - because it’s a sensible option which lets in as much light as possible, but isn’t so wide that you start to create unwanted blur.
It’s also a good idea because the mid-point, aperture wise, is where most lenses are at their absolute sharpest. Something which is known as the ‘sweet spot’ of a lens.
This doesn’t mean that a wider or narrower aperture will give you an un-sharp shot - but at a microscopic level, the mid-point is considered to give the best possible image quality. You would probably have to put the image on your computer and enlarge it to about 300% of the normal size though, to notice any difference!
If you’re taking general landscape or scenery shots - for example in bright light, when on holiday - you can leave the aperture on this mid-point for most of the shots you take, as everything is in the distance and nothing is too close to the camera.
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But then, if you see a flower for example and want to blur the background, you now know that you need to choose a wider aperture to make that possible. Likewise if you want to include something very close to the camera, but have everything sharp behind it as well, you know that you need a narrower aperture.​
In these examples, the robin shot needs a blurry background to make the subject stand out - so you'd choose a wide aperture (small number) - or for the beach shot, you want everything in focus from the rock at your feet to the far horizon, so you would choose a narrow aperture (big number) to get 'all the slices' in focus.
Having said that, in reality it’s rare that you need everything from right in front of your camera to the far distance in focus at once, mainly because that very ‘close to the camera’ part of the scene isn’t usually even in shot. So actually, you will spend far more time in the wider half of the aperture scale (small number to mid point) than you will in the narrower half (mid point to larger number).
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