Boy Do I Have A Story To Tell You

Aperture is extremely important to photography. It controls the amount of light passing through your lens and the second thing it does for your photos is it controls the field of depth. Now you're probably at huh? Well, how you ever seen pictures of people aka portraits and the background is a blurry mess? That is depth of field: the smaller the f/ stop the less depth of field you'll have. The bigger the f/ stop the more sharper your photos will be from front and back.

Today we will talk about f/ 22 or what Bryan Peterson calls the "storytelling" picture. In landscape photos tack sharp is the name of the game. In these photos, you'll want everything in your photo, from front to back, tack sharp. Just as the name says these photos tell a story. There is beginning (the foreground subject like the trees), a middle (the street and tree), and an ending (the housing and sun). For these pictures f/22 is the aperture you want, capturing the beginning, middle and end in sharp detail. Also a 12-24 mm or a standard 18-55mm is the perfect lens for the job because it will capture the widest view possible.

As of now I'm in Long Beach, Ca visiting family for about a month, and along on the trip my hard drive bit the dust. Yes, I'm so sad and angry because if I wasn't going to be able to use it it could have stayed home and been safe and sound. I'm going to see if the warranty can save it but my data is probably gone forever. Luckily, I listen so I back up like crazy in multiple locations. So yay for me some of my photos are still on my desktop hard drive. I am though going to get me another hard drive, hopefully a portable one, so that I can have a portable back up and have another place to back up my files. So my original photo for this exercise is somewhere on my desktop maybe but as of now I have no access to it, so I had to snap one just for this. Problems that I see are...

Not tack sharp there was some shake somewhere and done at 55mm instead of 18mm. I will be practicing this as I love landscape photography. Comments are welcome as well as links to your own landscape photos and tips. If you'd like to join in and do your own "storytelling" photo be my guess and drop the link in the comment box.

Bryan Peterson is the best pick up his books: "Understanding Digital Photography" and the great "Understanding Exposure" That book is recommended by everyone pick it up!

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Taken with my Canon Rebel T1i on a tripod 18-55mm lens at *55mm, f/ 22 for 1/8 sec

*This should have been 18mm but I really wanted to focus on the bushes as the subject