F5.7 and Stare There!?

A lot of apertures just don’t get enough love nowadays. As photographers, we are typically drawn to the tried and proven apertures that are often highlighted on our lenses. F8, F16, the usual suspects and, when light is low or if you’re aiming for a blurred bokeh background, the lowest aperture is generally selected. Sometimes we just let our cameras choose the aperture automatically, if that option happens to be available. And that’s fine. There’s no right way of doing things in photography that’s universally agreed upon after all. But what I would like to suggest is trying out the lesser used ones. Sometimes the results might surprise you, especially if your lens happens to have a lot of different looks on tap, as it were. But you’ll only know if you try these in-between apertures out. A lot of disposable cameras are permanently set at F9 or F11. So if you’re going for that slightly better than a toy camera aesthetic, why not try out an aperture within that range? The results can be interesting, especially if you have set up your lens so that most of what you see will be in focus. You can also find, in many cases, a lot of funky, unique looks available between F3.7 and F5 for instance. But each lens is unique. By trying out these lesser-known ones, you might find a few ones that produce unique results that even non-photographers can detect. Other photographic results might only be visible to perceptive photography aficionados. One modern lens that lends itself rather well to a range of various looks is the Pentax Limited Series 43mm. I also find that Soviet lenses tend to offer unique surprises too in this respect, not only on account of their lens designs but also, well, due to unintentional variations in the lenses due to not so stringent production methods. So, in short, give these lesser loved apertures a chance. Who really knows what lurks behind F5.7 on each of your lenses?