From photography to videography, film, history, and technology, the show covers a wide range of topics to educate and inspire creators of all kinds. Maximum aperture simply puts a cap on your ability to photograph without lots of noise in dim light.Each week Roger Cicala, founder of, hosts conversations about the art and science of capturing images. How well a lens performs is not solely based on how wide its aperture is. You also have to consider depth of field requirements.narrower apertures increase the depth of field, while very wide apertures make it razor thin.

The wider the aperture, the more likely you are to encounter optical aberrations, which can potentially degrade image quality beyond what an f/3.5 aperture might. In terms of light gathering ability, a fast f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens will indeed be considerably better than an f/3.5 lens. an f/3.5 lens.a four-fold difference in light.

The same would be true for an f/1.8 lens vs. I think it also demonstrates why long lenses with fast apertures are capable of gathering so much more light than short/wide lenses with fast apertures.įrom the areas above, you can see that any of the lenses, 50mm, 100mm, or 300mm, will all gather about four times as much light at f/1.4 than at f/2.8. I think seeing the differences in terms of area helps demonstrate why a small difference in the aperture number means a big difference in exposure. Diameter doesn't really tell you the exposure story, though. The table below shows the diameter of the apertures of each lens at various settings: Lens | f/1.4 | f/2 | f/2.8 | f/4ġ00mm | 71.23mm | 35.71mm | 25mm | 17.85mmģ00mm | 214.29mm | 150mm | 107.14mm | 75mmĪs you can see from the above table, diameter increases for any given aperture as focal length increases. Lets use a 50mm, 100mm and 300mm lens as examples. We can verify this by calculating the actual diameter and area of the aperture for any given lens. At f/2.8, the area of the aperture is twice as much than at f/4. The aperture affects exposure because it is the area of the opening in the diaphragm that lets light through. Note: Fujifilm Finepix S2980 is a point and shoot camera with 14MP maximum resolution 18x Optical Zoom with some handy Face Detection,Auto-Focus and Image Stabilisation options. I would like to see your suggestions based on real-life experiences. The first question I need to address is whether a lens with an aperture f/1.4 or f/1.8 perform considerably better than a f/3.2 lens(let us assume same shutter speeds) in dim light conditions.I haven't dealt neither with f/1.8 nor with f/1.4 lens before. Some friends suggested me that I should go for a camera(perhaps something like a DSLR) with a better sensor and f/1.8 or f/1.4 lens.But as I don't want to become a photographer by profession, I need to think twice before I leap because of the high cost factor associated with these cameras and lenses. Still I'm not getting satisfactory dim-light performance(I don't want to use a flash). The maximum aperture I can get in my Fujifilm Finepix S2980 is f/3.2. I understand the fact that the light entering the camera is directly proportional to the square-root of the aperture. I had a second a second thought about asking this question because I have already asked a very similar question here but then I decided to proceed and make this one as different as possible.

Fujifilm lens big aperture