Digital Photography Ycademy 9

At the begin­ning, many pho­tog­ra­phers strug­gle with the con­cept of aper­ture and depth of field. I remem­ber back in the 60ies when my dad ciselled the prin­ci­ples into my brain. He was shoot­ing with a good old Leica I loved for all the but­tons and lit­tle wheels it fea­tured for tons of settings.

I could not imag­ine what they were good for: but they looked god for sure and that was a good enough rea­son to fetch my interest.

By the way, have you ever noticed how “look-focused” pho­tog­ra­phers are? And the look of their cam­era? It’s part of the over all estethics pho­tog­ra­phers are in search of and  attached to, I guess.

Of course it is sex­ier to have your por­trait taken in an Indi­ana Jones Look (or the Marl­boro Man minus the smell of the sweat­ing horse and the cow dung…) hold­ing a big cam with a mega lens in front, than Indi­ana with an iPhone, huh.

Back to the depth of field. I was exer­cis­ing on flow­ers in the gar­den 50 years ago and the game went as follows.

Marienkae­fer

1. Move as close as you can (don’t use Macro to start with)  to the object you want to take a pic­ture of and set your lens to the widest aper­ture (that’s the small­ers f/number!). In my case it was f/2.8 at that time). If you do this with your dig­i­tal cam­era, the cam will auto­mat­i­cally select the appro­pri­ate shut­ter speed.

2. Repeat the exer­cise with f/5.6, f/8, f/11 and f/22.

3. You have now 5 pic­tures of the same flower with a back­ground (and maybe fore­ground) of the sur­round­ing flow­ers. How­ever your pic­tures are dif­fer­ent from each other and the dif­fer­ence is in the depth of field.

Con­clu­sion: The nar­rower the aper­ture, the wider the depth of field! This is the real issue here, mean­ing, the smaller the open­ing of the lens’s diaphragm (high f/number), the longer the cam will expose the sensor(film) to the light inflow and the sharper your pic­ture gets along the depth (z-) axes.

The wider the aper­ture (small f/number) the nar­rower the depth of field (and the faster the shut­ter speed) and you end up with these beau­ti­fully blurred back and or fore­grounds. Your dig­i­tal camera’s auto-focus, focused on the flower you want to fea­ture, will auto­mat­i­cally make sure that your depth of field is opti­mized for the flower.

Flower

Do the same exer­cise again by zoom­ing out or mov­ing away from the object you are tak­ing the pic­ture of. Shoot from a dis­tance of about 1 meter to 1.5 meters (4–5 feet). Again you will end up with a series of pictures.

You will find: the fur­ther you move away from the flower, the wider the depth of field will get! This is the sec­ond impor­tant rule.

Put sim­ply: if you want a sharp pic­ture through­out the whole depth, increase the dis­tance and use higher f/numbers. If on the other hand you wish a pic­ture where the focused object is sharp and the back­ground and or the fore­ground are blurred, then move closer and decrease the f/number (wider aper­ture or diaphragm of the lens is wider open, which trig­gers a faster shut­ter speed).

Con­clu­sion 1

This exer­cise should help you to improve on your Macro shots and Por­traits. The effect is func­tion of depth of field: to limit the depth of field use a wider aper­ture (smaller f/number) and move closer; the back­ground will be less in focus and you get the desired blur-effect.

Con­clu­sion 2

This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant sin­gle con­cept which will bring you ahead of the masses. I guess 99% or more of all cam­era users are not aware of this con­cept and will con­tinue to shoot hap­pily their flat shots.

Con­clu­sion 3

The best way to achieve the effect is by using your camera’s man­ual set­tings (pri­or­ity on Aper­ture A-mode). If your cam does not allow for Aper­ture pri­or­ity, then you still have the option to pull your pic­ture through Light­room of Pho­to­shop and to manip­u­late the back­ground out of focus … but why going that route if your cam can deliver a bet­ter qual­ity original?

It’s obvi­ous that skilled Pho­to­shop users are absolutely capa­ble to fake the blur effect, but believe me: if you want it well done, it takes time, loads of it and you have the bit­ter taste in your mouth of some­one who just became aware that he re-invented the wheel. Imag­ine: the cam does in a frac­tion of a sec­ond (lit­er­ally) what may cost you hours in Photoshop.

No, I am not against Photo Edit­ing Pro­grams at all. Pho­to­shop is a great tool and can do things the cam­era can­not do; on the other hand the cam­era is a great tool as well and it can do cer­tain things bet­ter than Pho­to­shop. So, let’s use each tool for what it is made and you cumu­late the qual­ity of the cam’s work with the qual­ity of PS.

The best results in Pho­to­shop are achieved with a great pic­ture at the base: the more time you spend to make your pic­ture great, the less time you will spend in Pho­to­shop and the bet­ter your image data.

Try this over the week-end and come back with some nice, more or less blurred pic­tures! Stuff them into a new Gallery on Your Semi­oman­tics Evo­lu­tion site to share your results. I am look­ing for­ward to it.

• marienkae­fer
• depth of field flowers
• DIGITAL AUTO-ture evo MUSIC
• famous pho­tog­ra­phers that use depth of field
• magic but­tons
• MARIENKAEFER GIF ANIMADOS
• pho­tog­ra­phy of flowers
• small depth of field photography

Related posts:

1. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 7
2. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 8
3. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 3
4. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 4
5. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 6

Tags: Depth of Field, Digital Photography, Digital Photography Academy, Lightroom, Photoshop, Ycademy, Yorgo Nestoridis

This entry was posted on April 16, 2010 at 10:04 am and is filed under Design, Digital Photography, Media, Media Design, Media Marketing Publishing, Photo Editing, Photoshop, Web Design, Web Design Basics, Ycademy, yorgo Design, YORGOO Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.