March 22, 2010

Photography lesson today. Depth of Field or DOF, in the most basic definition, is the part of a picture that is in the sharpest focus. Having a large DOF is like having most, if not all, of a picture in focus. Front to back. Having a shallow or short DOF means that an object is in focus and the foreground and/or background is out of focus. Having a subject, such as a person, up close and in focus and having the background out of focus creates what is called bokeh. (Bokeh is a Japanese term meaning "blur".) As demonstrated in the following picture (taken in March 2008, with my DSLR):


I set out on a quest to explore my options of having a short depth of field with my point-and-shoot Canon camera. This is not a hard task with a DSLR. Just use a wide open aperature, and you can achieve a short depth of field. With a PAS, you don't have manual control. But you can use a Macro setting, which uses a fairly wide aperature. The following picture was taken today with my Canon PAS using the Macro setting and no flash:

Notice the first bottle in focus, but the others blurred? Success.

There is also a technique called custom bokeh that manipulates the shapes of out-of-focus lights in the background. Pretty darn cool looking. I'll save that for a future post.