Aamir Zakaria Photography

Find­ing the aper­ture sweet spot of your lens can make a big dif­fer­ence in the sharp­ness of your photographs.

As you already know, the size of your aper­ture con­trols your depth of field.  A small­er aper­ture (high­er f‑stop) will give you greater depth of field (greater front-to-back sharp­ness), while a larg­er aper­ture (small­er f‑stop) will give you a shal­low­er depth of field, with more blur­ri­ness in the back­ground or fore­ground of your focal point.

There’s anoth­er impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in terms of sharp­ness.  I saw an excel­lent exam­ple of this while tak­ing some shots yes­ter­day in Indianapolis.

Here’s a shot at f/25 (1/40 sec, ISO 100, handheld):

A small­er aper­ture is gen­er­al­ly a good thing for land­scape shots, to try to get as much of your pic­ture in focus.

Now here’s the same shot at f/11 (1/30 sec, ISO 100, handheld):

I actu­al­ly used an exam­ple with a slight­ly slow­er shut­ter speed, which would tend to increase any vis­i­ble handshake.

The moral of the sto­ry:  lens­es have a sweet spot where the over­all sharp­ness is high­er.    Take this into con­sid­er­a­tion when choos­ing your aper­ture.  All else being equal, choose an aper­ture at that sweet spot.  Exper­i­ment with your lens­es to find out where that sweet spot is.