For my SoCal location, morning sun & average water have worked best. Mine are from seed & all germinated early but those sown in the full sun quickly stunted & faded away. My soil is clay heavily amended with compost & leaf mold. They get sun until late morning & they are quite happy.

Here in Calistoga they do quite well in partial shade,have had them last for years. Particularly like Aquilegia caerulea, called Rocky Mountain Columbine, easily grown from seed. Al

They grow well for me in the Central San Joaquin Valley. Our soil, locally, is very sandy and drains quickly. I have both hybrid aquilegias and some that I grew from seeds of columbines that grow in the Sierra Nevadas (near Yosemite NP). Both do well here in full sun and in shade. The ones in full sun are more compact. I let them go dormant in the summer by cutting the irrigation water. As soon as the rains return in late fall and winter, they spring back to life bigger than the years before. As others mentioned, they do reseed readily.

I had purple and yellow aquilegias and for couple years and I just deadheaded before self seeding and they came back every year. Morning sun only until 11 am. Then they mixed and I got a very pretty very pale yellow with hint of light purple. I harvested those seeds that year and then nothing came back. This year I have started from seed indoors and have about 30 new little plantlets to put in ground in April.
By August they mostly die off in the heat and try to come back in Oct, but the cold in Dec forces into dormancy.
I had them in a small planter on NE side of house.