This is a great video from Robert Vasquez from Photo Magic Productions. He simply explains, shutter speed, ISO, and depth of field. Awesome job!! His website is www.smays.com

“I love to shoot wide open!”

I found those words coming from a newbie photographer who shoots in auto focus a little scary. Let me digress a little and explain what wide open means and then show you WHY you better know something if you shoot wide open and want to have your pictures turn out good.

This is Marcel speak. I’m throwing out technical terms and just going to give it to you plain and simple. Shooting wide open, at a low depth of field, on your aperture means you are using a low number and thus the portion of the image that will appear in focus will be more limited. This was shot with an aperture of 2.8. Shooting wide open means you get a nice cool blur effect. It’s great for portraiture, dandelion stems, and low light situations.

My son, Child 2 as I like to call him, asked “So I’m standing here in the middle of this field holding this stem because….?” Because I want to help you, dear readers, to get this concept. This was shot with of aperture of f/stop of 10. F/10 means more will be in focus.  This picture should be sharper, but standing in a middle of field with Child 2, pondering the meaning of the situation, I was laughing…a lot. Let’s just leave it at that for right now. If you want a lot to be in focus, use a higher depth of field.

Why shooting with a lower depth of field can be scary? Because people shoot in auto focus (or Auto Frack as I like to call it). You really want to mess up your pictures, shoot them in Auto Frack.

This shot? Auto Frack at 2.8. Beautiful golden autumn evening. My daughter or Child 1, is here wearing her favorite hat (which is actually mine by the way). Auto Frack focuses lovely on the hair, but the eyes? Generally the most important feature to be sharp, blurry, but boy that hair and part of the hat NICE! X for Blurry and Stars for Focused=bad shot.

Ok, so now I tell Auto Frack to go to heck and manual focus at 2.8, oh wow! It worked! Still, the left eye is softer than the right. For them both to be in focus they need to be on the same plane. They are not. You will have a button on the side of your lens that will give you the option of auto or manual focus. On the Canon lenses, it is located generally on the left side and will say AF for auto focus  or MF for manual focus. Switch to MF for the most consistent results.

So, now I shoot at f/6.3 and look, oh wow, both eyes in focus (almost. the left is still out a little…the dog was jumping on me, the cat was lounging on my feet, and Child 2 was throwing dandelions stems in the shot, we will call it good). Now, if I’m standing 10 feet away will this difference be so pronounced? No, but I’ll leave that for another day. You want to understand  depth of field, turn off the auto focus and practice. For a more in depth discussion and somewhat confusing article, visit, http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/dof.shtml. You may have to read it ten or fifteen times. I will visit this subject again.  

Next week on Photography Tips, “Why your Camera LCD is a Liar and how to avoid Deception and Betrayal from the one you love”.

I’ll be here on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays.