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Shallow Fields Forever
November 2009
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Take Better Photographs Today!
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Hello, !
Welcome to all the new subscribers this month!
I'd like to send a huge "thank you!" to the 35 wonderful customers who wrote reviews for my business on www.MomsOutLoud.com. Dawn Michelle Photography won Best Photographer in Collin County. Yea! They declared it a tie because it was a really close contest with tons of great reviews. I'm honored to have received the award in a market as competitive as this one.
The North Texas Kids Family Expo was unbelieveable yesterday. Thousands of people were there. I think I'll be recovering for a while.
I hope your Halloween was safe and happy and that you have a wonderful November. I will be in town over Thanksgiving so if you'd like a family shoot, set this up with me soon before it gets booked up.
Dawn
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Shallow Fields Forever
Many years ago, I was traveling with a brand new camera and lots of big ideas. I wanted to take a picture of a flower but I wanted the mountains behind the flower to be blurry. Photoshop wasn't around then (and besides, blurring the background because you don't know how to do it in-camera is cheating), and I had no concept of how to do this.
Now that I'm a photographer, I know the technical term and how to accomplish what I wanted to then. In a nutshell, depth of field refers to how much of the scene is in focus. What I wanted for the flower and mountain picture was a shallow depth of field; in other words, only a small part of the picture was to be in focus.
There are a few factors that work together to determine depth of field but the biggest one is aperture (aka f-stop). The larger the aperture number, the greater the depth of field. So more of your scene will be in focus at f-stop 22 than at f-stop 1.8. (I'm keeping it brief here on purpose. We could talk a while about this.)
Here are a few common uses for shallow depth of field:
- Portraits - Close-ups where the mask of the face is sharp but the ears are in soft focus. Or when you want a cluttered background to be out of focus.
- Food photography - Pick up a magazine and see how often the foreground is sharp but the background is blurry.
- Abstracts - Keeping the foreground sharp and the background blurry can often lead to interesting abstract art.
- Macro photography - Close-up photography. For example, photographing a bug on a leaf where the other foliage in the background is blurry.
- To highlight a particular part of the scene - The human eye is drawn to that which is in focus. Keeping part of the scene in sharp focus will naturally draw the eye there.
Determining the best depth of field for a subject is an interesting study and a great topic for self-assignment. Try photographing the same subject at different f-stops and see what happens. Look at photographs, noting the depth of field used. Do you like the way it was done? Why or why not?
As I've said before, I'm sort of a control freak when it comes to my camera. I always shoot in manual mode so that I can determine the f-stop and shutter speed myself. You can teach yourself to shoot in manual mode, too, I swear! It takes some practice but once you learn you won't want to do it any other way.
Happy photographing!
Dawn
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