Depth of Field

Hello Everyone!!! Just a short little information tidbit. To help control depth of field, with all other things being equal, the larger your aperture, the less DOF you have. This will give you those creamy, defocused backgrounds that are a staple of portrait photography.

If you use a point and shoot camera, and it has manual controls, this is easy, if a bit counterintuitive. Whatever your aperture control is, its listed as a number (f2, 2.8, 4, 5.6 etc.) the smaller the number, the larger the aperture. This is due to the fact that the number is the reciprocal of the ratio of the lens opening to the size of the sensor.

When you set your point and shoot to portrait mode, this is what it does. It tries to select the lowest aperture available. Many other factors come into play, but we will cover those later.

 Dave Mo

This entry was posted on 11. December 2008 at 00:20 and is filed under Photographic Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.