Today, I present a lesson. I can’t call it a lesson learned, because I’m still learning it.
The lesson is: pay attention to your aperture, and choose it wisely.
On this particular day, I forgot about that, and I’m still kicking myself over it. I was on a vacation, staying on the coast of Maine. The sea rolling in against the rocky shore was something I don’t often get a chance to shoot, living in Ohio. So I wanted to take full advantage of the time I was there.
On this particular morning, I selected my gear, loaded it into my backpack, slung my camera around my neck, and hiked down the coast from our rented chalet about a half mile, to a narrow, rocky point extending out into the bay, where the breakers rolled in and crashed majestically against the rocks. A beautiful spot, on a beautiful, sunny morning, with the sun shining at a great angle through the waves as they came in, illuminating them in brilliant color. Out on the point, I had a great perspective. It was a perfect time and place for a shoot.
So I shot. And shot. Watching the waves coming in, firing away as they broke and crashed and splashed. I made sure I used fast shutter speeds, to freeze the motion of the breakers and the splashes. Occasionally checked the histogram, to avoid overexposure. But I didn’t really pay attention to the aperture, or give it much thought.
Oops.
I posted awhile ago about f-stops. I said a narrower aperture (larger f-stop number) would give you a greater depth of field. But during this shoot, I goofed: I didn’t set the aperture small enough. I was shooting at f/5.6. Oops. That’s not only a lousy choice for shooting landscape/seascape shots, where you typically want good DOF, it’s also a lousy choice for getting good sharp photos, with most telephoto lenses. Most lenses are at their sharpest when they’re stopped down a bit. At f/5.6, I had my lens wide open. Oops.
The result? I got some photos that are OK, but not anywhere near as good as they coulda/shoulda/woulda been if I’d been more careful.
If I could do this shoot over again, I’d use at least f/11, or f/16. I could have closed down the aperture that much (two or three stops), and let the ISO go up to 400 or 800. The photos would then have been crisper and sharper, with much better depth of field. But of course, I can’t do the shoot over again, at least not anytime soon. I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to travel back to Maine again. So I got some OK shots, but not the great shots I might have. One more oops, kicking myself, trying to learn the lesson: pay attention to aperture, along with shutter speed and ISO!
Wave breaking over the rocks. Note that the rocks themselves are not at all in focus, due to a poor choice of aperture, making the depth-of-field too thin.
A nice shot, which could have been even better with greater depth-of-field and a sharper capture—both defects caused by poor choice of aperture.