The Beginner’s Guide to Camera Aperture

Here's a look at how filmmakers weaponize camera apertures and what makes them such an essential storytelling tool.
Blade Runner Eye and camera aperture

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video that explores an introduction to camera aperture.


It is poetic, if not a tiny bit creepy, how film cameras physically mimic the human eye.

One of the more obvious similarities, at least aesthetically, is aperture. A camera aperture is a shutter-like mechanism that, like our pupils, controls how much light passes through a camera’s lens. Just as our pupils expand and contract to let more or less light in, the size of the aperture affects the area in focus and the amount of light passing through it. Much as the size of our pupils affects depth perception, camera apertures are the principal element that manipulates depth of field — as well as focal length, bokeh, and more.

Filmmaking is as much a technical discipline as a creative one. And this is perfectly encapsulated in the dual role of the aperture: both as an essential photographic mechanism and as a means to support visual storytelling techniques. The video essay below offers a thorough tutorial on the basic mechanics and the visual storytelling made possible with camera aperture.

Watch “Ultimate Guide to Camera Aperture — What is Aperture & the Exposure Triangle Explained [Ep 1]“:


Who made this?

StudioBinder is a production management software creator that also happens to produce video essays, which tend to focus on the mechanics of filmmaking itself, from staging to pitches and directorial techniques. You can check out their YouTube account here.

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Meg Shields: Based in the Pacific North West, Meg enjoys long scrambles on cliff faces and cozying up with a good piece of 1960s eurotrash. As a senior contributor at FSR, Meg's objective is to spread the good word about the best of sleaze, genre, and practical effects.