In the last post with David Bergman we learned to slow down, to analyze your shot, to shoot manual. We also learned that those conditions help foster your creativity and push your artistic boundaries without any help of hefty camera features. Shooting with manual Aperture in particular gives you a new playground called depth of field. But is aperture the only element of controlling what’s in focus?
In this episode with Mark Wallace from Adorama TV, we explore 3 WAYS HOW TO CONTROL WHAT’S IN FOCUS with help of lively Nesli Avci.
There are three ways to control your depth of field. The first, aforementioned, is aperture. The other two are focal length and distance to subject.
The widest aperture (1.4, 2.4, 3.5, or else lowest) will give you the most shallow depth of field, where your background will be a sea of blur with no details to identify.
Open your lens to the widest aperture and take a shot.
Notice how blurry the background is. The building behind is almost indistinguishable from a vague generic wall. Now let’s try shooting with the opposite setting – closing your lens to the biggest f-stop. Don’t forget that it will make your picture much darker since less light will come through the lens. To balance it out, increase your ISO.
Take a shot!
Now everything is in much better focus. This technique is pretty well known and is not a surprise to most photographers. Let’s take a look at the second technique:
What if you keep your f-stop the same but instead you will change your lens and shoot with 21mm instead of 50mm?
Doing exactly that Mark Wallace keeps both lenses at f/3.4 and snaps the same frame, at the same distance.
Shot above is 50mm, f/3.4 lens. Notice the degree of blur behind the model. Now let’s switch to a wider lens – 21mm and shot lovely Nesli.
at the same f/3.4 aperture of course!
The blur of the background has drastically decreased with the wider lens, at the same aperture, same distance. Speaking of the latter.
The third way to manipulate your depth of field is to walk back and forth to your subject, with fixed aperture, same lens. To experiment with this technique, turn your focus wheel to either full-left or full-right extreme position and move towards the model to catch her in focus.
Here is the example of “very close” extreme of focus.
The background is nice and blurry. Now lets turn the focus to the opposite extreme. In our example that is walking further away from the model to catch her in focus.
Watch the full episode with Mark Wallace and Adorama TV: