Why would I want to change the aperture on my digital camera?

Why would I want to change the aperture on my digital camera?

Mark Comon (Vice President, Paul's Photo, Torrance, CA) gives expert video advice on: What does my digital camera's "manual exposure" mode allow me to do?; How do I change the shutter speed on my digital camera?; Which is worse to overexpose or underexpose pictures on my digital camera? and more...

Why would you want to change the aperture your digital camera? Well, why would you want to change gears in a car? The aperture is really important to control the picture. The aperture lets in the light, and the light is the most important thing to your picture. Without light, we ain't got a picture. So we set the aperture to control both the light and the amount of focus or depth of field. You set a wide opening, like f2 or 2.8, blur the background and have your subject razor sharp. You shoot a medium aperture, 5.6 or 8 so the subject is sharp and background is slightly out of focus but still recognizable. We shoot f stop 11 or 16 or 22 for a landscape picture when you want the flowers in the foreground, the river, and the mountains all in focus.That's why we set the aperture. To me the aperture is far more important to great pictures than the shutter speed, because it controls the look and feel of the picture.That's why in my camera, 9 percent of the time I'm in f-stop priority, controlling that f-stop, because it's so important to the picture.