As referenced in a previous post, I bought a new camera (pictured above) and signed up for a photography class. The class is 6 hours every Saturday for 4 weeks.
The first class was just chock full of information with the main topic being: Depth of Field (Basically, are things in front of and in back of your subject in focus, do you want them to be?).
What I noticed, really, is that my own personal depth of focus is pretty narrow... meaning, my attention span has definitely decreased since the last time I was in any kind of school situation. Vocabulary words were just flying by me (things like aperture, f-stop, ISO). The only thing I had focused on when setting up my camera was auto (as in auto focus, auto white balance, auto everything). The first thing we did in class was set everything to manual... scary! By 2pm I was ready for a nap!
Anyway, I did my homework as diligently as I had always done in school. The homework assignment was (on all manual settings), to choose 5 subjects (from a list) and do a Depth of Field Study using existing light sources only (no flash) on the lowest f-stop setting and highest f-stop setting available with the lens were were using, adjusting shutter speed as needed (for light).
Two of my subjects were Garden (i.e., roma tomatoes from our garden) and Feet. I have included the photos here.
Example of Wide Depth of Field,
everything is in focus, even the trees way over
in Rex's yard
Narrow Depth of Field, pretty much just the
tomatoes and part of the table on the same plane
as the tomatoes are in focus
Wide Depth of Field... The railing is in focus...
Well, you get the "picture"
2 comments:
I am assuming Andy, Betsy, and Nicole have given you a hard time of breaking the family tradition of Canon??? (Actually, if my budget would have been bigger at the time I was purchasing I would of gone Nikon also.) Have fun!
Hi Kim... actually Michael gave me the hardest time as he said if I ran into a bind, I could ask my siblings how to work my camera (he knows how lazy I am). Anyway, even though it scares me, I love my camera. Obviously I still have a long way to go and I am assuming that when we are on vacation and I am trying to get pictures quickly I will switch some things back to automatic (like white balance), but for now it is really fun trying to figure things out.
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