So last week I gave you a quick tutorial on what Depth of Field is. This week I want to go into more detail as to how the different settings you choose will affect the depth of field you see in your images.
Things that affect your depth of field are:
Aperture, focal distance (how close you are to your subject) and the focal length of your lens.
Lets imagine you are shooting a landscape photo of the mountain lake. You are trying to get the entire scene you see before you in a photo. The idea is to have the entire image in focus from the closest piece of grass to the trees in the distance across the lake. You want the entire scene in focus from side to side and top to bottom. So how do you do it?
Well lets start with a wide angle lens 18mm to 20mm would be good or a zoom lens that starts small around 18mm. If you don't have a wide angle lens just use the smallest lens you have. Just remember the smaller the lens (i.e. 10mm to 18mm) the more of the scene you can capture in a photo. There are ways to use a larger lens and then stitch the photos together in photoshop and create the scene from multiple images, but that is perhaps another post.
Now that we have a lens lets think about the settings you are going to use on your camera. I like to shoot in one of the manual modes for landscapes I almost always use Aperture priority but straight up manual mode will work just as good. For todays post lets say we are using Manual mode. In manual mode we will have to know how to read the meter in the camera to determine if we are getting a good exposure or not. It's no use to take the shot if you are over or under exposing the image. The goal is to get an image that you can actually see the lake scene. Too much light and the image will be washed out (overexposed) not enough and it will be dark (underexposed).
Lets start with our Aperture setting, some of the aperture settings you will see when you look through your camera could be 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 you could see different numbers depending on your lens and your camera body. For a landscape image where you want a large depth of field you want to be around 16 at least if not more. Always remember the bigger the number the more depth of field. The problem is the bigger the number also means the iris in the camera is getting smaller. This in turn means you will need more light to get a good exposure. I recommend that you pick the aperture you want, lets say 22 is our target aperture. Depending on the light we are working with we may or may not need a tripod to get the desired image.
Set your aperture setting to 22 then looking through the camera while facing the scene you are trying to capture, adjust the shutter speed until your meter is telling you that you have a good exposure. If you are at 1/60 or higher then you should be able to hand hold the camera and get the image you want. If it goes to 1/30 or lower you should use a tripod or set the camera on something stable and use your timer trigger to get your image. Other wise things may be slightly out of sharpness due to camera movement.
If you have done everything correctly your image should look something like this one.
Keep in mind that this post is for the novice who doesn't own a light meter and maybe doesn't own a tripod, so I am keeping the jargon to a minimum. However, if you are reading this and you don't have a camera that can be set to manual mode this was a huge waste of your time. You can try setting your camera to the setting that looks like a mountain scene on the dial and see if that works for you but I can't promise you'll get the same results.
Things that affect your depth of field are:
Aperture, focal distance (how close you are to your subject) and the focal length of your lens.
Lets imagine you are shooting a landscape photo of the mountain lake. You are trying to get the entire scene you see before you in a photo. The idea is to have the entire image in focus from the closest piece of grass to the trees in the distance across the lake. You want the entire scene in focus from side to side and top to bottom. So how do you do it?
Well lets start with a wide angle lens 18mm to 20mm would be good or a zoom lens that starts small around 18mm. If you don't have a wide angle lens just use the smallest lens you have. Just remember the smaller the lens (i.e. 10mm to 18mm) the more of the scene you can capture in a photo. There are ways to use a larger lens and then stitch the photos together in photoshop and create the scene from multiple images, but that is perhaps another post.
Now that we have a lens lets think about the settings you are going to use on your camera. I like to shoot in one of the manual modes for landscapes I almost always use Aperture priority but straight up manual mode will work just as good. For todays post lets say we are using Manual mode. In manual mode we will have to know how to read the meter in the camera to determine if we are getting a good exposure or not. It's no use to take the shot if you are over or under exposing the image. The goal is to get an image that you can actually see the lake scene. Too much light and the image will be washed out (overexposed) not enough and it will be dark (underexposed).
Lets start with our Aperture setting, some of the aperture settings you will see when you look through your camera could be 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32 you could see different numbers depending on your lens and your camera body. For a landscape image where you want a large depth of field you want to be around 16 at least if not more. Always remember the bigger the number the more depth of field. The problem is the bigger the number also means the iris in the camera is getting smaller. This in turn means you will need more light to get a good exposure. I recommend that you pick the aperture you want, lets say 22 is our target aperture. Depending on the light we are working with we may or may not need a tripod to get the desired image.
Set your aperture setting to 22 then looking through the camera while facing the scene you are trying to capture, adjust the shutter speed until your meter is telling you that you have a good exposure. If you are at 1/60 or higher then you should be able to hand hold the camera and get the image you want. If it goes to 1/30 or lower you should use a tripod or set the camera on something stable and use your timer trigger to get your image. Other wise things may be slightly out of sharpness due to camera movement.
If you have done everything correctly your image should look something like this one.
Keep in mind that this post is for the novice who doesn't own a light meter and maybe doesn't own a tripod, so I am keeping the jargon to a minimum. However, if you are reading this and you don't have a camera that can be set to manual mode this was a huge waste of your time. You can try setting your camera to the setting that looks like a mountain scene on the dial and see if that works for you but I can't promise you'll get the same results.
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