What are the f-stops on your camera or lens? And what kind of effect does changing them have? Our chart explains all
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Even if you’ve never changed the f-stop on your lens or through your camera, you’ve probably noticed this setting at some point. While its entirely possible to leave the camera to deal with this and never adjust it yourself, it’s arguably the most important thing to learn if you really want to take charge of your photography.
Definition: What are f-stops?
Otherwise known as aperture, the f-stop regulates the amount of light that can pass through a lens at a given shutter speed. Assuming nothing else changes, a small aperture will let in less light than a larger one, so it would take longer for the same quantity of light to pass through to the sensor. It works on the same principle as an hourglass, in that the size of the opening between the two chambers dictates how long a quantity of sand will pass from the top to the bottom.
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So, the smaller the aperture, the longer the shutter speed you’ll need in a given scenario. You can see this for yourself by setting your camera to its Aperture priority mode and adjusting the aperture in either direction: the shutter speed should change with every click of the dial.
Something that confuses a lot of novice photographers is that small physical apertures have high f-stop numbers such as f/16 and f/22, while large (or ‘wide’) apertures have low f-stop numbers such as f/1.4 and f/2. You can read why this is here.
So, what kind of impact does the f-stop, or aperture, have on your image? First, it has the potential to affect exposure, although whether it does so depends on the exposure mode you use. If you use the Manual mode, for example, and just change the aperture without also changing the shutter speed, your image will become darker or lighter depending on which you adjust this. In the Aperture priority mode, however, your camera will automatically adjust the shutter speed as you do this to keep the same balanced exposure at all times.
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‘STOPPING DOWN’ AND ‘OPENING UP’
Ever hear these terms? Stopping down the lens or aperture simply means to make the aperture smaller, such as from f/8 to f/11. Opening up, meanwhile, means doing the opposite.
Whichever mode you use, changing aperture has an effect on depth of field. Depth of field concerns the extent to which different areas in the scene are rendered in focus, and a photographer will typically use a medium or small aperture to achieve more definition throughout. Depth of field does, however, also depend on other factors, such as where you focus in the scene.
There are issues with using both very small and very wide apertures, so you need to judge this from scene to scene to understand which setting is most appropriate. Wide apertures are great for isolating subjects from their backgrounds, but images can be softer at these settings due to an effect known as spherical aberration.
Particularly wide apertures can also be tricky to use in bright conditions, as your camera may not be able to use a fast enough shutter speed to keep everything exposed correctly, which leads to overexposed images.
Small apertures, meanwhile, can make an effect known as diffraction more prominent, which also has a softening effect on images. These apertures are also harder to use when hand-holding a camera, as the smaller the aperture the longer the shutter speed you need – and at some point you simply won’t be able to hold it steady enough to produce a sharp image. Here, a tripod or an effective image stabilization system can help.
The Copernican Planisphere, illustrated in 1661 by Andreas Cellarius. (Image credit: Public domain)
In the early 1500s, when virtually everyone believed Earth was the center of the universe, Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the planets instead revolved around the sun. Although his model wasn’t completely correct, it formed a strong foundation for future scientists to build on and improve mankind’s understanding of the motion of heavenly bodies. [Related: Famous Astronomers: List of Great Scientists in Astronomy]
Indeed, other astronomers built on Copernicus’ work and proved that our planet is just one world orbiting one star in a vast cosmos loaded with both, and that we’re far from the center of anything. Here is a brief biography of Copernicus:
Celestial education
Born on Feb. 19, 1473, in Toruń, Poland, Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus is the Latinized form of his name) traveled to Italy at the age of 18 to attend college, where he was supposed to study the laws and regulations of the Catholic Church and return home to become a canon. However, he spent most of his time studying mathematics and astronomy. Due to his uncle’s influence, Copernicus did become a canon in Warmia, but he asked to return to Italy to study medicine and to complete his law doctorate. (Of course, he may also have been thinking that the skies above Italy were clearer than above Warmia, according to Famous Scientists.
Nicolaus Copernicus (Image credit: Public Domain)
While attending the University of Bologna, he lived and worked with astronomy professor Domenico Maria de Novara, doing research and helping him make observations of the heavens. Copernicus never took orders as a priest, but instead continued to work as a secretary and physician for his uncle in Warmia.
When he returned to Poland to take up his official duties, his room in one of the towers surrounding the town boasted an observatory, giving him ample time and opportunity to study the night sky, which he did in his spare time.
A new model
In Copernicus’ lifetime, most believed that Earth held its place at the center of the universe. The sun, the stars, and all of the planets revolved around it.
One of the glaring mathematical problems with this model was that the planets, on occasion, would travel backward across the sky over several nights of observation. Astronomers called this retrograde motion. To account for it, the current model, based on the Greek astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy’s view, incorporated a number of circles within circles — epicycles — inside of a planet’s path. Some planets required as many as seven circles, creating a cumbersome model many felt was too complicated to have naturally occurred.
In 1514, Copernicus distributed a handwritten book to his friends that set out his view of the universe. In it, he proposed that the center of the universe was not Earth, but that the sun lay near it. He also suggested that Earth’s rotation accounted for the rise and setting of the sun, the movement of the stars, and that the cycle of seasons was caused by Earth’s revolutions around it. Finally, he (correctly) proposed that Earth’s motion through space caused the retrograde motion of the planets across the night sky (planets sometimes move in the same directions as stars, slowly across the sky from night to night, but sometimes they move in the opposite, or retrograde, direction).
Copernicus finished the first manuscript of his book, “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”) in 1532. In it, Copernicus established that the planets orbited the sun rather than the Earth. He laid out his model of the solar system and the path of the planets.
He didn’t publish the book, however, until 1543, just two months before he died. He diplomatically dedicated the book to Pope Paul III. The church did not immediately condemn the book as heretical, perhaps because the printer added a note that said even though the book’s theory was unusual, if it helped astronomers with their calculations, it didn’t matter if it wasn’t really true, according to Famous Scientists. It probably also helped that the subject was so difficult that only highly educated people could understand it. The Church did eventually ban the book in 1616.
The Catholic Church wasn’t the only Christian faith to reject Copernicus’ idea.
“When ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ was published in 1543, religious leader Martin Luther voiced his opposition to the heliocentric solar system model,” says Biography.com. “His underling, Lutheran minister Andreas Osiander, quickly followed suit, saying of Copernicus, ‘This fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down.'”
Copernicus died on May 24, 1543, of a stroke. He was 70. He was buried in Frombork Cathedral in Poland, but in an unmarked grave. Remains thought to be his were discovered in 2005.
Remains found
In 2008, researchers announced that a skull found in Frombork Cathedral did belong to the astronomer. By matching DNA from the skull to hairs found in books once owned by Copernicus, the scientists confirmed the identity of the astronomer. Polish police then used the skull to reconstruct how its owner might have looked.
Nature quotes the AFP as stating that the reconstruction “bore a striking resemblance to portraits of the young Copernicus.”
In 2010, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland’s highest-ranking clerics before being reburied, his grave marked with a black granite tombstone decorated with a model of the solar system. The tomb marks both his scientific contribution and his service as church canon.
“Today’s funeral has symbolic value in that it is a gesture of reconciliation between science and faith,” Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said according to the Associated Press. “Science and faith can be reconciled.”
The unmarked grave was not linked to suspicions of heresy, as his ideas were only just being discussed and had yet to be forcefully condemned, according to Jack Repcheck, author of “Copernicus’ Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began.”
“Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork?” Repcheck said. “Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become.”
Refining the work
Although Copernicus’ model changed the layout of the universe, it still had its faults. For one thing, Copernicus held to the classical idea that the planets traveled in perfect circles. It wasn’t until the 1600s that Johannes Kepler proposed the orbits were instead ellipses. As such, Copernicus’ model featured the same epicycles that marred in Ptolemy’s work, although there were fewer.
Copernicus’ ideas took nearly a hundred years to seriously take hold. When Galileo Galilei claimed in 1632 that Earth orbited the sun, building upon the Polish astronomer’s work, he found himself under house arrest for committing heresy against the Catholic Church.
Despite this, the observations of the universe proved the two men correct in their understanding of the motion of celestial bodies. Today, we call the model of the solar system, in which the planets orbit the sun, a heliocentric or Copernican model.
“Sometimes Copernicus is honored as having substituted the old geocentric system with the new, heliocentric one, as having regarded the sun, instead of the Earth, as the unmoving center of the universe,” writes Konrad Rudnick, author of the Cosmological Principles. “This view, while quite correct, does not render the actual significance of Copernicus’s work.”
According to Rudnick, Copernicus went beyond simply creating a model of the solar system.
“All his work involved a new cosmological principle originated by him. It is today called the Genuine Copernican Cosmological Principle and says, ‘The Universe as observed from any planet looks much the same,'” Rudnick wrote.
So while Copernicus’ model physically placed the sun at the center of the solar system, it also figuratively removed the focus from Earth, making it just another planet.
This is my First Lab of Internet!! Awesome!!!
The Internaut day is celebrated on August 23, anniversary of the World Wide Web, which was developed in the CERN laboratories (Enquire / EV project) in Switzerland during 1989 – 1990, and opened to new users after that day in 1991. ❤ SHARE TO CELEBRATE INTERNAUT / INTERNET DAY ❤
History of website
Tim Berners-Lee — Biography
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim invented the Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he co-leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford, UK. He is President of and founded the Open Data Institute in London.
In 2011 he was named to the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation, a globally oriented private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare. He is President of London’s Open Data Institute.
In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany’s Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of “Weaving the Web“.
On March 18 2013, Sir Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for “ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity.”
Sir Tim has promoted open government data globally and spend time fighting for rights such as net neutrality, privacy and the openness of the Web.
On 4 April 2017, Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. The Turing Prize, called the “Nobel Prize of Computing” is considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science.
2018 – FCC Plans Net Neutrality Rollback For June 11; Senate Democrats Plan A Key Challenge
“The Internet wasn’t broken in 2015,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says, referring to the year when net neutrality rules were adopted. Pai is seen here speaking to the House Appropriations Committee earlier this year.
Alex Edelman/Getty Images
The Federal Communications Commission says that its order ending an era of “net neutrality” — the rules that restrict Internet service providers’ ability to slow down or speed up users’ access to specific websites and apps — will take effect on June 11.
That is one day before the Senate’s June 12 deadline to vote on a Congressional Review Act resolution filed by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. The resolution aims to overturn the FCC’s repeal of the Obama administration’s Open Internet Order of 2015, which officially established net neutrality.
Formally called a resolution of disapproval, the CRA has the support of every member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, along with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. It also has the support of Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, and a number of businesses and organizations, from Reddit and Tumblr to Wikimedia.
I invented the web as an open, permissionless space #foreveryone. The FCC’s repeal of #NetNeutrality threatens to take that away. Tell the Senate they must protect net neutrality to keep the web open
The Senate voted to save net neutrality
The U.S. Senate voted to save net neutrality. Join millions of other every day Americans demanding freedom on the Internet in the House of Representatives.
To force action on Markey’s CRA, Senate Democrats filed a discharge petition on Wednesday, setting up a vote that Markey says should take place next week.
Democrats say they easily have the 30 votes needed to send the CRA to the Senate floor. Once there, the caucus would need a simple majority to adopt the resolution — and with Collins, it has 50 votes. Republicans might be able to muster only 49 votes because of the absence of Sen. John McCain (who has not cast a vote since early December because of health concerns).
If it gets Senate approval, the CRA would then need to pass the House — and to be signed by President Trump. The president has already signed more than a dozen CRAs, but those were aimed at doing their more common work, of reversing the work of a previous administration.
When White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked about this CRA’s prospects at Wednesday’s briefing, she answered, “We’ll keep you posted when we have a specific policy announcement on that front.”
Net neutrality’s repeal has stirred passions and controversy, as proponents warn of an impending era of online content being blocked, slowed down or otherwise discriminated against, under the FCC’s planned changes. Ending net neutrality, they say, could also force consumers to pay more for slower Internet service.
The FCC’s move has also sparked legal challenges. In February, a coalition of 23 attorneys general filed a lawsuit to block the rollback of net neutrality.
After the FCC set the June date for the policy change, acting New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood issued a statement saying in part, “A free and open internet is critical to New York, and to our democracy. The repeal of net neutrality would allow internet service providers to put their profits before the consumers they serve and control what we see, do, and say online.”
The FCC adopted its Restoring Internet Freedom Order in December. Today, Chairman Ajit Pai, part of the Republican majority, said the new policy would end “the heavy-handed, utility-style regulation from 1934 of broadband Internet access service.”
“The Internet wasn’t broken in 2015, when the prior FCC buckled to political pressure and imposed heavy-handed Title II rules on the Internet economy,” Pai said in a statement Thursday. “It doesn’t make sense to apply outdated rules from 1934 to the Internet, but that’s exactly what the prior Administration did.”
After the announcement, one of Pai’s FCC colleagues spoke out against the move.
“This is shameful,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who’s in the Democratic minority, said on Twitter. In a statement, she said, “The agency failed to listen to the American public and gave short shrift to their deeply held believe that internet openness should remain the law of the land.”
Universe is created, according to Kepler 4977 B.C.
On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Germany. As a university student, he studied the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ theories of planetary ordering. Copernicus (1473-1543) believed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, a theory that contradicted the prevailing view of the era that the sun revolved around the earth.
In 1600, Kepler went to Prague to work for Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, the imperial mathematician to Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler’s main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars. When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe’s extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye. Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things. Kepler corresponded with Galileo and eventually obtained a telescope of his own and improved upon the design. In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away. In 1619, he produced his third law, which used mathematic principles to relate the time a planet takes to orbit the sun to the average distance of the planet from the sun.
Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force. Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and math. He died on November 15, 1630, in Regensberg, Germany. As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.
Considered the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made major contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics and philosophy. He invented an improved telescope that let him observe and describe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots and the rugged lunar surface. His flair for self-promotion earned him powerful friends among Italy’s ruling elite and enemies among the Catholic Church’s leaders. His advocacy of a heliocentric universe brought him before religious authorities in 1616 and again in 1633, when he was forced to recant and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
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