Aperture and the Exposure Triangle

In my continuing quest for knowledge of all things photography one of the basic elements is Aperture or your f-stop and how that plays in the the Exposure Triangle.  I really feel this Exposure Triangle sounds like a new reality show...."See how Amy reacts to Tim and Jane's indiscretions on the next episode of Exposure Triangle."  Sounds like something FOX would air.  Alas, I digress. 

For what I've gleamed through pages and pages of e-books.  By the way buy some ebooks from this guy and this guy.  Good stuff!  Anyhoo...aperture and the f-stop is the how you set the size of the diaphragm in the lens that light passes through.  The bigger the aperture (and smaller F- stop number, like that makes sense) the more light comes through the lens.  However, this aperture nonsense is a bit tricky.  The f-stop number also helps dictate focus.  If you want to just focus on a subject in the foreground and get that nice blurry background you need to have a lower f-stop which means a larger diaphragm.  See how it can get confusing?  And if you want to have the foreground and the background in focus, you need a larger f-stop and smaller diaphragm.

You can do all sorts of neat tricks by changing the aperture.  You can get those starry pictures where the sun is bursting, and you can focus on one guitar string and have all the others blurred out.  Most photographers set their cameras on Aperture mode and let the camera figure out the ISO and shutter speed for the image they are trying to get.  At least the ones who wrote the books I've read do.

It's going to be a short post tonight folks as it's Christmas time, I'm tired, and I have a dog that needs to be walked.  I'll pick up on shutter speed next and all the fun you can have with that.