What is the aperture and how does its design affect the quality of the pictures.

The camera was invented in the twenties of the seventeenth century by Joseph Niepce. It was Niepce who owns the world's first photo "View from the Window", which lasted 30 minutes. Since then, cameras from rather primitive simple opto-mechanical devices have turned into sophisticated electronic devices using the latest technologies and developments of virtually all branches of science and technology. The main design changes, however, did not affect all parts of the camera. Perhaps, the most important and determining block of all types of cameras - the lens - has changed not so much as the so-called body stuffed with electronics. It is enough to note that the old lenses from film cameras still work fine today on modern digital cameras with the latest electronic content in the form of matrices, electronic sensors, drives for autofocusing and other innovations. Many professional photographers even prefer to use old lenses, considering them better, giving a special charm to pictures.

The lens design is at first sight simple and unassuming. It consists of optics in the form of a lens (or several lenses, combined in one common system), a frame that serves as the lens housing, and a diaphragm.

The design of the lens depends on its purpose. In simple basic lenses everything is extremely elementary. Several lenses with a diameter corresponding to the type of camera (the larger the diameter of the lens, the greater its throughput and light intensity), the diaphragm and the housing with the focusing and diaphragm focal length rings and the attachment mechanism to the corresponding body of the camera.

In zoom lenses, a scaling mechanism is added to this set of elements.

Of course, the quality of the lens is determined primarily by what kind of optics is installed on it. From the lens material depends the presence or absence of distortion, on their diameter - the degree of vignetting, that is, darkening around the edges of the frame, aberrations and other deviations.

An equally important part of the lens is its diaphragm.

What is a diaphragm? This is an element of the lens, allowing you to control the amount of light coming through the lens on the matrix or film.

The aperture consists of so-called petals and defines such parameters as depth of field and bokeh shape. And if the question of what a diaphragm is, it seems simple, then not everyone knows what bokeh is, and the depth of field is simply a characteristic of a quality photograph.

So, to the bokeh. The diaphragm consists of petals that converge, reducing the opening and diverge, increasing it. Bokeh is determined by the number of these petals: the more of them, the better the bokeh, that is, the more correct form blurs out of focus are obtained.

Having understood what a diaphragm is, you can go to the depth of field. It is the larger, the smaller the aperture opening. For shooting landscapes, small values of aperture holes are usually used to have a greater detail of the image, and for portrait shooting, larger aperture values are better, which allows focusing the focus on the subject and avoiding unnecessary background details.

So, we determined what aperture, bokeh and depth of field, and also found out in general terms how the camera is arranged and what is the design of the lens. This information is of a purely fact-finding nature, but they are very important for beginning photographers, as they are basic for understanding the technical features of cameras, which are very numerous these days and which are developed by leaps and bounds towards universalization and simplification of the shooting process. It remains only to choose the best suitable camera and start creating your own masterpieces of photo art. It's so simple, and so cool!