Studio Photography Lighting: F Stops

Video Transcript

"This is Mark Bowers from Bowers Photography in American Fork, Utah bowersphotography.com, and we're talking about F stops and the way you use it in a studio, in studio lighting. The F stop controls the amount of light that comes into the camera to hit your film or your sensor. It's from an old, it was invented in Germany and it also, the second thing that it controls, is the amount of depth of field, or how much distance is it from being out of focus through the sharp focus and back to out of focus again. The way we use it in lighting is depending on your subject. Do you want a lot of a depth of field or do you want a short depth of field, depending on if you want to focus in on one little thing, and so the F stops are usually the range between two point eight all the way up to F twenty-two. The larger numbers have lots of depth of field; the shallow numbers have very shallow depth of field. Let me take the lens off here and just show you how the depth of field works on the particular lens. Right, here's the F stop numbers from two eight through twenty-two for this particular lens, and each lens is a little bit different, and then as you look through the back of the camera, you can see as we open it and close it, the F stop will go larger and smaller to control that light."