I don’t have an SLR, so this lesson was extremely frustrating. No matter how hard I tried, fiddling with the aperture did not alter the field of depth. Over the course of more than 200 photos, I learned that I can only change my depth of field when my camera is in macro mode with one item VERY close and the background reasonably distant. Since the majority of my food photos are close-ups, this is fine. For now.
The lesson: In Lesson 3, we looked at the different effects you can achieve with different lenses — from fish eye to wide angle. We also looked at how aperture can affect the depth of field, either blurring the background or foreground for effect. Coston also stressed the importance of a tripod. (Note to self: get a bloody tripod and stop balance the camera on books or stacked coasters.)
The assignment: There were two assignments this week. The first was to take a photo using the widest possible and longest possible lenses. The composition was supposed to be interesting. The second assignment was to take a photos where your subject was in focus and the background was blurred, and a second were everything was in focus.
My results: They stank. My camera is sooooo autmatic I can’t force it to make “mistakes”. I fiddled with the zoom but couldn’t get the distance required to show off the 15X zoom. So I dug into my archives and came out with a practice shot from May when I was in Nova Scotia.
The first three shots are zoom practice.
The rest of the shots are me trying to get shallow and deep focus. You aren’t seeing things. I used a carved wooden puffin and a ceramic sheep (same one from the abstract shot on Lesson 1). I figured they wouldn’t move and would provide different textures. Is it just me or are the results somewhat creepy?
The closer together the two figures were, the less obvious the blur was. The further away, the more obvious the blur. Regardless of their proximity, I found the lighting changed even though I didn’t move the camera. Very frustrating. And as I said before, kinda creepy…
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- Church in distance
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- Laundry in the distance
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- Laundry on line
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- Dots and lines shallow
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- Dots and lines deep
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- Whispering – shallow
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- Whispering – deep
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- Beak and horn shallow
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- Beak and horn deep
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- Sheep and puffin deep
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- Sheep and puffin shallow
Charmian Christie
Keep trying different things – I’ve seen some of your food photos that have a nice shallow depth of field.
I felt the same way you did the first time I tried this assignment. In fact, I started saving for a dslr. As I tested out different kinds, though, I realized that the entry-level dslrs don’t have certain features I love on my point-and-shoot. For example, they don’t have the live lcd view (or if they do, the camera is very slow when that feature is on).
Still, the shallow DOF would be nice.
I’ll keep trying. Thanks for the words of encouragement. It’s very frustrating to know what you want the camera to do and not be able to make it do it.
Those food shots were close ups with a very distant background. And a lot of them are just dumb luck, too.
I found a decent tripod on ebay for not too much. It’s a Giottos (which I gathered was a good brand) and has worked great. It was $34.99 (including shipping)
Thanks for the info Laura. I did actually buy myself a tripod within a few days of posting this. Now I have to get back to my lessons. Fallen off the wagon a bit.
I’ll keep eBay in mind, though for lenses and other items.
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