## Monday, March 14, 2011

### APERTURE

APERTURE is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture of an optical system is the opening that determines the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane.The aperture determines how collimated the admitted rays are, which is of great importance for the appearance at the image plane. If an aperture is narrow, then highly collimated rays are admitted, resulting in a sharp focus at the image plane. If an aperture is wide, then uncollimated rays are admitted, resulting in a sharp focus only for rays with a certain focal length. This means that a wide aperture results in an image that is sharp around what the lens is focusing on and blurred otherwise. The aperture also determines how many of the incoming rays are actually admitted and thus how much light reaches the image plane (the narrower the aperture, the darker the image for a given exposure time).
The maximum aperture tends to be of most interest, and is always included when describing a lens. This value is also known as the lens "speed", because it affects the exposure time. The aperture is proportional to the square root of the light admitted, and thus inversely proportional to the square root of required exposure time, such that an aperture of f/2 allows for exposure times one quarter that of f/4.

Lenses with apertures larger than f/2.8 are typically known as "fast" lenses, though this has changed his
torically (in the past, larger than f/6 was considered fast, for example by the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica). The fastest lenses in general production are f/1.2 or f/1.4, with more at f/1.8 and f/2.0, and many at f/2.8 or slower; f/1.0 is unusual, though sees some use.

APERTURE AREA

The amount of light captured by a lens is proportional to the area of the aperture, equal to:

$\mathrm{Area} = \pi \left({f \over 2N}\right)^2$

Where f is focal length and N is the f-number.

The focal length value is not required when comparing two lenses of the same focal length; a value of 1 can be used instead, and the other factors can be dropped as well, leaving area proportion to the reciprocal square of the f-number N.

If two cameras of different format sizes and focal lengths have the same angle of view, and the same aperture area, they gather the same amount of light from the scene. The relative focal-plane illuminance, however, depends only on the f-number N, independent of the focal length, so is less in the camera with the larger format, longer focal length, and higher f-number. This assumes both lenses have identical transmissivity.