Tutorial ~ Depth of Field & Aperture

Awesomeeeee, thank you for making this! I have a point and shoot but could get an adapter to use lenses with it... and this really makes me want to get a 1.4 lens >_> I'm excited to see the tutorial about bokeh as well.

 

Gah, thank youu! I got used with a simple compact that pretty much did these things for me and I didn't get what I should do with my DSLR to achieve this effect XDD After some quick shots, I got it, thank you again

 

Thank you so, so much for this little tutorial! I've been reading up on how to achieve a shallow DoF, and these examples are very helpful -- my eyes still cross when I think about F-stops and all that. XD Time to pull out the camera when I get home from work and experiment!

 

Oh wow. I have a little Canon Powershot that allows me to adjust the aperture settings. My boyfriend's dad (who is a professional photographer) ran the basics of this by me in less than five minutes, but seeing results from it really makes a difference! Now I just wish that my little point-and-shoot had a wider range of aperture settings to choose from! XD

 

Thanks for the great tut, River!

 

River, you are a godsend! Thank you for your very informative tutorial!

 

lol Very good tutorial. Fun and informative, and not bogged down on technical terms. I just stopped in to see the glorious pictures, but really, excellent work here. I look forward to seeing your "because a crapton of bokeh just looks cool" tutorial. lol

 

Thank you so much with this tutorial! You've explained this so much better then anyone who has tried to teach me lol. I did have to look up a few things in my manual, but now I don't use the auto functions anymore!

 

Thanks, great advice/tutorial.

 

thank you =] the examples you posted and the size comparison of the opening size help immensely

 

Thank you!! I've been looking for a tutorial on DoF like this for ages, great explanation and easy to follow!

 

Really helpful!
I'm going to search for some good cameras right now and I wanted to know about this :3
And I really wanted to know how you did this, I had an idea but I wasn't enterely sure xD

 

Great write up!

I know you used the f1.4 lens in your example but the f1.8 lenses from both Nikon and Canon are also really good and at 1/3 or 1/4 the price for those who are looking for a lower priced option.

For Point & Shoot cameras you have less flexibility usually but using Portrait mode attempts to use the widest aperture (Smallest #) for shallow DoF.

The other factors are:
Distance: Keep your subject as close as you can while the background as far as possible.
Lens: A telephoto lens (Larger mm#) will give you shallower DoF than a wide angle lens.

Disclaimer: I own and use the Nikon 50mm f1.4 but I am a bit of a camera fanatic.

 

I might add something about sensor size.

Basically, the bigger the "sensor", the digital "film" inside the camera that actually captures the image is, the shallower the DoF will be, as well. That's why it's so hard to get shallow DoF with most point & shoot cameras, and why you get shallower DoF and an even nicer background blur with "full-frame" cameras like the Nikon D700 and the Canon 5D than you do with the smaller-sensor "crop" cameras like the D300s or 7D and below. An aperture of f/4 on a FF camera body looks like f/2.8 on a crop camera. F/2 on a Point & Shoot generally looks like somewhere around f/8 or f/11 on a crop camera.