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, a ‘middling’ aperture will do the job nicely – and your shutter speed will usually be fast enough to hand hold as well.
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 right ‘mid-point’ aperture for your camera will vary 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 blur things that you don’t want to.
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 when on holiday - you can leave the aperture the same for most of the shots you take, as everything is in the distance and nothing is too close to the camera.
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 between the widest aperture and the mid point than you will between the mid-point and the narrowest aperture.
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