A Lesson in Depth of Field, Part 2

I am back with part two of my discussion on depth of field. I hope you found yesterday’s post helpful. Is this depth of field thing starting to make some sense? I did not mention yesterday that you cannot control this if you are shooting in the automatic mode on your camera. You have to be brave enough to move to manual or aperture priority to play with this. That is exactly what you need to do – play with this. Set up a short row of items and shoot at different aperture settings. If you are in manual, you will need to adjust your exposure. Make notes of your results. It will soon make sense!

A very shallow depth of field…

This was shot at f/4.5 at a speed of 1/500th of a second. As you can read from those figures, the aperture (pupil) was wide open and the exposure was long at half a second! I focused in the middle of the image. The orange and part of the purple thread is in focus. I heard someone say once, “Do you want 2 things in focus or 22 things?” That little statement will help you remember which setting to use. The middle ranges keep everything in focus also. Practice these different settings on portraits or still lifes. I believe you will be happy with the results. I will talk about how your exposure affects all of this at a later time, but I think you can probably figure it out!

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A Lesson in Depth of Field, Part 1

When you talk about depth of field and how to achieve the amount you want in a photograph, most people have no idea what you are talking about. I am going to try to explain it to you and show you two examples. I won’t go into the technical points, but will attempt to make it easy for you to understand. Depth of field is, in plain language, the depth of the focus in your image; that is, whether only one thing is in focus in your image or everything is in focus.

A full depth of field… 

This image was shot at f/29 at 1/13th of a second (the exposure time). The aperature  (f/29) is very small. Think of the lens as an eyeball and the pupil is the aperature. Depth of field is created by the size the aperature (your pupil) in your lens. The larger the pupil, the more light is let in (ever had your eyes dilated?). On a lens, the more light that is let in, the shallower the depth of field (you can’t see clearly). Aperature sizes have a large range. The smaller the number, the larger the opening and the shallower the depth of field. Sometimes it is hard to remember which aperature gives you which results! I will continue this tomorrow and hopefully clarify this some more.

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Is This What He Meant?

I asked my instructor to look at my post yesterday and tell me what he thought. He said it is a great start! Now I need to add depth with shadows, highlights while having a foreground, middle and background – and to create an environment so my viewers can relate. I believe this photo has all of those things, but for some reason I just do not think it is what he meant! Plus, I did not have several hours to create an image today!

It has depth and a recognizable environment…

It is a beautiful day here in Huntington Beach. I had a great lunch and visit with a friend today. She was telling me about some new adventures in her life and what is going on. We hadn’t seen each other in about 4 months. We know each other from school and it was great seeing her.  She is a very talented graphic artist. She was asking me about  photography classes and she wants to go out soon and shoot some photographs together. The rest of my day is filled with exciting errands and fun stuff with Willie!

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A Depth of Field Challenge

Here I am with some more rocks, lining them up to attempt to get a complete depth of field. I think I accomplished it. I had to take a lot of images to get the focus the best I could and the spacing right so all the rocks would look the same distance apart. I have another image with no depth of field that just shows the third rock in focus. However, I did not want to bore you with that image.

A perfect example of depth of field…

I am sorry my post is late this Saturday afternoon. I have been working on this image for quite a while. I tried it indoors and outdoors with the rocks on a mirror but I then settled on inside with this white board. Today is Valentine’s Day. Larry and Shelley (the newlyweds) went down to Laguna Beach for a nice afternoon. Willie and I have done nothing and I don’t even know what we are having for dinner!  The dogs are sleeping and look very comfortable. We are getting ready for a late lunch and a nap sounds very good after that!

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