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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
06-26-2018, 04:57 PM
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There are at least five reasons for this kind of talk about brighter apertures.
1. Subject Isolation: There's a style of photography that prizes wide-open large apertures to create very thin depth of field and intentionally blurry foregrounds and backgrounds. A cynic might say that these one-eye-in-focus images are created to one-up other photographers who don't have f/1.4 lenses on full-frame cameras. But that's a bit harsh. Done well, the resulting subject isolation can create a very compelling image.
2. Larger Bokeh: A wider wide-open aperture also enables larger bokeh which can also be attractive.
3. Dim Lighting: The buyers who fall into the trap of picking the two most popular camera brands are often often forced to buy big-aperture lenses to cope with dim lighting conditions. With a Pentax camera, especially a K1ii, the use of it's SR image stabilization and excellent high-ISO performance creates much more latitude to pick a reasonable aperture and either slow the shutter or up the ISO.
4. Lens Sharpness: Some of the negative comments saying "I have to stop it down from there" might reflect the need to stop down the lens to achieve better sharpness. Most lenses have worse resolution and more image aberrations when used wide-open. Digital photography seems to encourage pixel peeping usually to the detriment of actually photography. Lens buyers who magnify their first image taken with their new, expensive, large aperture lens only to find some smearing in the corners of the image do complain about it.
5. Diffraction: Digital pixel peeping also means that many photographers avoid anything smaller than about f/11. Although f/22 has the potential to greatly increase the amount of subject matter in focus, all of that in-focus material will have a noticeable fuzziness due to diffraction. But maybe a little diffraction is fine if serves the greater purpose of a deep landscape image with foreground flowers and background mountain vistas.
Overall, I'd say that every aperture is useful for something although the ones at the two ends of the spectrum come with serious trade-offs. I'd also say that every aperture is wrong under some circumstances. Even the so-called sweet-spot aperture is wrong if it has either too much or too little depth of field, if it prevents using a very slow or very fast shutter speed, or if it forces too high an ISO. Ultimately, a faster lens does add a niche of photographic options as long as the photographer is willing to put up with the size and weight of the lens. It's up to each photographer to decide if they really want those options for super thin DoF, big bokeh, extra light gathering, etc. A proverbial 99% of images do not need big apertures so they are really aren't needed to be a great photographer. But some do enjoy that 1% niche.
Have fun with your K-1ii and welcome to the forums!
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