Why You Should Not Always Shoot at the Widest Aperture

Modern lenses are quite remarkable devices, and they often allow you to shoot at extremely wide apertures with little consequence in image quality, making it easy to fall into the habit of just leaving your lens at that maximum aperture for all your images. That can be a mistake, though, and it can make your work overly one-dimensional. This excellent video essay discusses some of the many reasons you might want to consider stopping down the next time you head out.

Coming to you from Jan Wegener, this insightful video essay discusses why shooting at only maximum aperture can be a mistake, and though Wegener is talking about this in the context of bird and wildlife photography, the points apply to many other genres. I think one of the biggest reasons not to do this is simply that it limits you creatively. If you always blow the background to blurry smithereens, you are missing a lot of changes to create more complex image compositions that achieve interesting balances among the elements in the frame and help to add a bit of context to your subject and more information to the story. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Wegener.