What F-Stop Should I Use?

One of the questions i get asked all the time is what F-stop do I recommend for photographing flowers? My answer is It depends . . . on what lens you’re using, what your subject is, how close to your subject are you and most of all – how much of your subject do you want in sharp focus?

When you choose your F-stop, you will determine how much of your photograph is in sharp focus. This amount is sharp focus is known as Depth of Field.

Sometimes, I use a shallow depth of field so that I can isolate the flowers I’m photographing from the background like I did in this photograph of bleeding hearts. I knew that I only wanted the flowers to be in sharp focus. So with  my camera set for Aperture Priority, I set my F-Stop to 2.8 – the smallest number F-Stop available on that particular lens. I knew this would give me the shallowest depth of field I could get given the lens I was using

 

 

Sometimes, I use a large depth of field so I can show every detail in a flower in sharp focus. When I photographed this orange parrot tulip in my studio, I set my F-Stop to 32 – the largest F-Stop available on that lens. I knew this would allow me to share every detail of the flower and since I was photographing against a white background, there wouldn’t be all sorts of details in sharp focus to distract you from my subject.

Usually I use a depth of field somewhere between a very shallow depth of field and a large depth of field. I want to share the details of a beautiful flower while not distracting you from my subject by have a busy background. In this Bluebird Columbine photograph, I set my F-Stop to 8 – which gave me a wide enough depth of field to have the flower in sharp focus – and shallow enough that the details in the background greenery are a bit blurred.

 

So as you can see – the answer to the which F-Stop question is – it depends on what you want your final photo to look like.

 

 

We’ll spend time working with F-Stops and Depth of Field during my Gardens of Philadelphia workshop in May. If you’d like to learn more about how to create photos that look the way you want them to, please join me for a week of photographing flowers and talking about photography. All the details for the workshop are on my website at https://beautifulflowerpictures.com/store/photographing-the-gardens-of-philadelphia-may-2019/

 

And if you’d like to see how the look of a photograph changes as you change your F-Stop – I’ve put some examples in an updated version of my What A Difference An F-Stop makes post at http://www.beautifulflowerpictures.com/blog/what-a-difference-an-f-stop-makes-updated-in-2019/