‘Aperture’ means the size of the hole in the lens, which determines how much light gets in through the lens, and hits the sensor. You have the ability to control this by changing the settings on your camera.
In physical terms, the hole is made bigger or smaller using an iris, much like your eye adjusts the amount of light getting in by making your pupil a different size.
A small hole is often referred to as a ‘narrow’ aperture, and a big hole is often referred to as a ‘wide’ aperture - so you will see these terms used, rather than just small or large.​​​​
Image credit: Freepik.com
​There are a fixed number of aperture settings on the standard lens that your camera probably came with, and these are a very odd set of numbers, as they actually refer to fractions. Each aperture setting is therefore referred to as being an ‘f number’, or sometimes an ‘f stop’ - and the standard set is as follows:
f22 f20 f18 f16 f14 f13
f11 f10 f9 f8 f7.1 f6.3
f5.6 f5 f4.5 f4 f3.5
As you can see this is a fairly odd set of numbers, but don’t worry about that for the moment. All you have to remember is that they are the opposite way round to the size of the hole (which is why they are written backwards) – and this is one of the hardest things to get your head around! So . . .
A LARGE number (f22) is a SMALL hole or NARROW aperture
A SMALL number (f3.5) is a LARGE hole - or WIDE aperture
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Depending on the lens you have, the numbers may go higher or lower than that - with some lenses going as far as f1.2 at the wide end, or f32 at the narrow end. There are reasons why you might want a lens like that in the future, but nothing you need to consider for the moment.
One thing to mention here is that if you have a compact or bridge camera, with a built-in lens, this will probably go from f2.8 to f8, or something similar, rather than using the scale above – with some variations, depending on the make and model.
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