When to use WIDE aperture or NARROW aperture in travel photography

Understanding Aperture as a Storytelling Tool

Moving Beyond the Technical Definition

Many photographers first learn about aperture as a technical component—a hole in the lens that gets bigger or smaller to control light. While true, that’s like saying a paintbrush is just a tool for holding paint. For a professional, aperture is the primary tool for directing the viewer’s attention. It’s how you tell your audience what matters in the frame, transforming a simple snapshot into a compelling story.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly reframe the technicals in creative terms. The f-number (like f/1.8 or f/16) is your command. A low number signifies a wide-open aperture, creating a shallow depth of field (DoF)—that beautiful, blurry background that makes your subject pop. A high number signifies a narrow aperture, creating a deep DoF where everything from the foreground to the distant mountains is sharp. This choice is one corner of the exposure triangle (along with shutter speed and ISO), but it’s the corner that holds the most narrative power.

The Pro Mindset: Every f-stop is a Conscious Choice

A seasoned travel photographer rarely raises their camera and randomly adjusts settings. Instead, the process begins with a question: “What is the story here?” The answer to that question determines the aperture before a single photo is taken. This intentionality is what separates a good photo from a great one. You are not just capturing a scene; you are interpreting it.

This decision almost always boils down to a choice between two narrative approaches: isolation or context. Do you want to isolate a single, powerful subject from its surroundings, making it the undeniable hero of the image? Or do you want to show the subject within its environment, weaving a richer story about its place in the world? Your f-stop is the tool that makes this choice a reality. A wide aperture isolates. A narrow aperture provides context. Every other setting follows from that single, creative decision.

When to Use a WIDE Aperture (f/1.4 – f/4)

A wide aperture is your key to unlocking some of travel photography’s most evocative and professional-looking images. By letting a large amount of light into the lens, it allows you to create a shallow depth of field, artfully blurring the background and making your subject the undeniable star of the show. This is where the magic of “bokeh”—the aesthetic quality of the blur—comes into play. Understanding your camera’s settings, particularly understanding exposure, is crucial for mastering this technique.

The Obvious: Creating Subject Separation and Bokeh

The most common and powerful reason to select a wide aperture is to isolate your subject from a distracting environment. By turning a chaotic background into a soft wash of color and light, you guide the viewer’s eye exactly where you want it to go. This is an essential skill for any travel photographer.

• Use Case: Portraits of locals in a busy market. Imagine a vibrant spice vendor in Marrakech. A wide aperture like f/1.8 will render their face and expression in crisp detail while melting the bustling crowd and colorful stalls behind them into a beautiful, abstract backdrop.
• Use Case: Food photography on a cluttered restaurant table. When you want to capture that perfect bowl of pho in Hanoi, an f/2.8 aperture can focus attention on the fresh herbs and rich broth, blurring the surrounding chopsticks, glasses, and table patterns into an unobtrusive setting.

While it’s tempting to always use the widest setting your lens offers (like f/1.4), this is often not the sharpest choice. Professional photographers frequently “stop down” slightly to f/2 or f/2.8. This small adjustment provides a critical increase in sharpness across your subject—ensuring both eyes in a portrait are in focus, for example—while still producing a beautifully obliterated background. Mastering the exposure triangle will help you make these critical decisions.

The Pro Secret: Using Bokeh to Add Context, Not Just Blur

Amateurs blur the background; professionals compose with it. The true artistry of a wide aperture lies in treating the out-of-focus areas not as a void, but as a painterly element that enhances the story. The background, though soft, should still contribute to the narrative of your image.

• Technique: Capture iconic landmarks as context. A portrait taken in Paris is elevated when you place your subject in the foreground and allow the Eiffel Tower to become a soft, creamy, and instantly recognizable shape in the background. The landmark isn’t sharp, but its presence is felt, establishing a powerful sense of place without overpowering the person.
• Technique: Use foreground blur for immersion. Create a more intimate and dynamic scene by shooting through an object in the foreground. Capturing a street scene through the leaves of a tree, over the shoulder of someone in a crowd, or through a rain-streaked café window adds layers and depth. This foreground blur, created by your wide aperture, makes the viewer feel like they are a participant in the moment, not just an observer.

The Lifesaver: Conquering Low-Light Travel Situations

Your travels will inevitably lead you into beautiful but dimly lit environments where flash photography is forbidden or would ruin the atmosphere. A wide aperture is your single most important tool for capturing these moments cleanly and without a tripod. This is especially useful when exploring night cityscapes.

• Shooting inside the solemn, ambient light of ancient cathedrals, shadowy museums, or serene temples becomes possible without pushing your ISO to noisy levels.
• Capturing the magical ambiance of a city during blue hour or the neon glow of nighttime streets can be done handheld, preserving the spontaneous energy of the moment.

A wide aperture’s ability to gather more light allows you to use a faster shutter speed, which is your ultimate defense against blurry photos caused by camera shake. Before you travel, take time to understand your lens’s performance. Find its sharpest wide-open setting to perfectly balance the need for maximum light with the demand for high-quality, crisp images. This is key to achieving proper exposure.

When to Use a NARROW Aperture (f/8 – f/16)

The Classic: Achieving Front-to-Back Sharpness in Landscapes

When you stand before a breathtaking vista, the goal is often to capture the entire scene with immersive, crisp detail—from the closest wildflower to the most distant mountain peak. This is the primary domain of the narrow aperture. By “stopping down” your lens to settings like f/8, f/11, or f/16, you create a deep depth of field, rendering the entire story of the place with clarity.

This technique is indispensable for classic travel shots, including:

• Sweeping mountain vistas and grand cityscapes: Think of the rolling hills of Tuscany or the sprawling urban lights of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak. A narrow aperture ensures the entire panorama is sharp and engaging.
• Architectural photography: When photographing a magnificent cathedral or a historic building, you want every intricate detail, from the foreground steps to the distant spire, to be in focus.

While you can learn the complex math of hyperfocal distance, the simple pro-hack is to focus roughly one-third of the way into your scene. This technique is a remarkably effective way to maximize depth of field, ensuring both the near and far elements of your composition are acceptably sharp without resorting to complicated charts.

The Pro Secret: Layering Elements for a Deeper Story

A narrow aperture isn’t just a technical tool for sharpness; it’s a narrative device. Professionals use it to create a clear and deliberate relationship between elements at different distances within the frame. This transforms a simple picture into a thoughtful composition with layers of meaning.

The key is to compose a shot with a compelling foreground subject that acts as an anchor and leads the viewer’s eye into the rest of the scene. Because both the foreground and background are in focus, they are visually connected, telling a more complete story.

• Technique: Imagine a weathered boat rope coiled on a dock in the immediate foreground. By using an aperture of f/11, you can keep that rope sharp while also rendering the fishing village it belongs to in the background with perfect clarity. The viewer instantly understands the connection—the rope is not just a rope, but a part of the village’s daily life.

This ability to build a narrative within a single frame, connecting subject to environment, is a true hallmark of professional travel photography.

The Creative Trick: Crafting Sunstars and Starbursts

One of the most visually striking effects you can create in-camera is the “sunstar” or “starburst,” where a point of light like the sun or a distant streetlight transforms into a brilliant star with distinct rays. This isn’t a filter; it’s a direct result of physics and your aperture setting.

Using a narrow aperture, typically f/11 or smaller (like f/16 or f/22), causes light to bend around the straight edges of your lens’s aperture blades. This diffraction is what creates the starburst effect. The narrower the aperture, the more defined the points of the star become.

• Technique: For the most dramatic and controlled effect, position the sun so it is partially peeking out from behind another object—a mountain ridge, the edge of a building, or through the branches of a tree. This prevents the sun from completely blowing out your exposure and helps define the rays more clearly.

The look of your starburst is unique to your lens. The number of points in the star is determined by the number of aperture blades inside the lens. A lens with an even number of blades (e.g., 8) will produce that same number of points (8 points). A lens with an odd number of blades (e.g., 9) will produce double the number of points (18 points). Knowing this allows you to choose a lens specifically for the creative effect you desire.

The Pro’s Workhorse: Mastering the Mid-Range (f/5.6 – f/8)

While the dramatic effects of wide and narrow apertures get most of the attention, professional photographers spend a surprising amount of time in the middle ground. The f/5.6 to f/8 range is the unsung hero of travel photography—a versatile, reliable setting that balances sharpness, depth of field, and light-gathering for a huge variety of situations. Understanding the interplay between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, often referred to as mastering the exposure triangle, is key to achieving this balance.

The “Sweet Spot” for Walkaround and Street Photography

When you’re exploring a new city on foot, with potential photo opportunities around every corner, you need to be ready. This mid-range is often called the “sweet spot” for a very practical reason: it’s where most lenses deliver their peak optical performance. Images shot at f/8 are typically sharper from corner to corner than those shot at f/1.8 or f/22, with minimal distortion or vignetting. This technical excellence makes it a perfect default setting for general exploration, and is a great way of achieving proper exposure.

This reliability is the foundation for a classic professional street photography technique known as zone focusing. Instead of relying on autofocus, which can be slow to react to a fleeting moment, you can set your camera manually.

• Set your aperture to f/8 to ensure a reasonably deep plane of focus.
• Pre-focus your lens to a specific distance where you anticipate action will happen—for example, three meters (or ten feet) away.
• Now, anything that enters that “zone” of focus will be sharp. You can raise your camera and shoot instantly, capturing candid expressions and authentic interactions without the delay of a hunting autofocus system.

Balancing Subject and Scene: The Environmental Portrait

Sometimes, the story isn’t just about a person; it’s about the person in their world. This is the essence of the environmental portrait, and the f/5.6 to f/8 range is its perfect tool. A wide aperture would blur the background into oblivion, losing crucial context. A very narrow aperture might make the background too busy, competing with your subject for attention.

This mid-range strikes the ideal balance. Consider these scenarios:

• A chef meticulously plating a dish in their bustling restaurant kitchen.
• An artist surrounded by canvases and paint tubes in their sunlit studio.
• A vendor proudly displaying their handcrafted goods at a vibrant market stall.

In each case, using an aperture like f/5.6 ensures your subject is perfectly sharp and stands out as the hero of the image. At the same time, the background remains clear enough to be recognizable, providing essential narrative details that tell the viewer who this person is and what they do. The environment becomes a supporting character, not just a blurry backdrop. This approach also complements the advice found in our Snapping Success: Photo Tour Tips.

Breaking the Rules: Advanced Aperture Strategies

Once you have mastered the fundamental reasons for choosing a particular aperture, you can begin to use them with more creative intent. The most compelling photography often comes from knowing the rules so well that you understand precisely when and how to break them. These advanced strategies move beyond simple problem-solving and into the realm of pure artistic expression.

Using a Wide Aperture for Landscapes

Conventional wisdom dictates that landscapes demand a narrow aperture for front-to-back sharpness. But what if the story isn’t about the entire vista, but about a single element within it? By using a wide aperture like f/2.8 in a grand landscape, you can intentionally isolate a subject—a lone wildflower on a cliff edge, an interesting pattern on a rock, a single windswept tree—and render the vast background into a soft, impressionistic wash of color and light. This technique transforms a literal documentation of a place into a more emotional, dreamlike interpretation. It’s a powerful way to guide the viewer’s attention and convey a feeling of solitude or focus amidst immense scale.

Using a Narrow Aperture for Close-Ups

Just as we can use wide apertures for landscapes, we can employ narrow ones for subjects that are very close. While a wide aperture is typical for close-up shots to create subject separation, it’s not always the right choice. Consider photographing a relatively flat object where you need absolute, edge-to-edge clarity, such as an antique map spread on a table, the intricate tile work on a cathedral floor, or a detailed carving on a temple wall. In these situations, a narrow aperture like f/11 ensures that every line, texture, and character is perfectly sharp across the entire frame, leaving no part of the subject to fall into softness.

Thinking About Diffraction

Here is a piece of knowledge that separates experienced photographers from beginners. You might assume that to achieve maximum depth of field, you should always use the narrowest aperture your lens offers, such as f/22 or f/32. However, this is rarely the sharpest option. At these extremely small openings, a phenomenon called diffraction occurs. As light waves are forced to squeeze through the tiny aperture, they begin to scatter slightly, which results in a subtle but noticeable loss of overall image sharpness and fine detail.

For this reason, most professional landscape and architectural photographers avoid their lens’s minimum aperture. They know that the sweet spot for a deep depth of field combined with peak sharpness is usually between f/11 and f/16. This range provides an expansive plane of focus without sacrificing the critical crispness that makes a high-quality image truly stand out.