A Look into Depth of Field for Beginner Photographers

Photography can be a fantastically rewarding hobby - and although it may have once been an expensive one, equipment is slowly but surely becoming more accessible to everyone. With this in mind, it’s easy to improve your skills without much professional training or the most expensive kit.

Take depth of field for example. This is a term that is thrown around a lot in the world of photography, but for beginners, it’s hard to catch up with the jargon. In many ways this is a very technical part of photography, but it’s not too difficult for novices to grasp. OK Let’s break it down…

What is Depth of Field (DoF) in digital photography ?

Depth of field is essentially an area of sharpness:  it encompasses the distance between the nearest points in shot, all the way to the further objects. This area gives a zone to choose focus from. Of course, it is up to the photographer, what should be in focus and how sharply they want this part to appear.

Knowing the terms for everything isn’t the be-all and end-all, but certainly with photography enthusiasts it can be difficult to avoid in a conversation.

How to get the desired Depth of Field with your camera ?

The depth of field, or this specific zone, is normally influenced by three factors; the aperture, the length of your lens, and how far away you are from what you want to photograph.

Talking about aperture in optics, this is simply referring to the opening in your camera through which light (and your image) travels. It is this opening that determines just how the rays of light come into your camera in the first place and can vary between different makes and models of camera. In the same way the shutter speed is in relation to how long the light has to reach the sensor in your camera, the aperture is in regards to the amount of light.

a) How to get wide DoF

If we’re getting technical again, aperture is often referred to as an f-stop and is expressed as numbers. You may be familiar with this as a decimal number. As the f-number increases, the depth of field increases too. For example, an aperture of f/32 will be greater than that of f/5.

 

When most of the image is sharp, this would be a wide depth of field. This is easier to achieve with a wider focal lens, as it allows you to see more of an area. Think about taking a photograph but you want to get more into your image. What do you do? Step backwards! Well, a wide angle lens allows you to get this additional depth of field without tripping backwards and bringing your camera all the way to your chin.

b) How to get shallow DoF

On the opposite end, if you are after a very specific area, you are restricting the depth of field, and so a telephoto lens is ideal in capturing these instances, particularly if your subject you want to concentrate on is at a reasonable distance away. Unlike the wide DoF, shallow DoF is the result of lowering down the f-number on your camera.

In order to get the balance right, depending on what end result you are after, there are plenty of calculators out there in order to estimate depth of field, many of which can be found online.

In this sense, photography and it’s depth of field can be meticulously planned prior to even taking your equipment out of its casing. Although incredibly useful, it’s important to remember not to do this for every image.

Despite being able to carefully calculate the depth of field in order to improve the scene of a selected picture, it is sometimes good to have these skills as a backup and instead to use your eyes to judge the situation. Photography is more often than not all about being captured in the moment, and being able to take a snapshot moment, and sometime you just need to feel it.

Brett Harkness

About the Guest Author:
Brett is a professional photography training provider and a part time commercial photographer. If you’d like to brush up your skills with some photography training, Brett provides courses in Manchester, UK.

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What is ISO in digital photography and when to select the right ISO

While operating the camera in manual mode you probably must have stumbled upon the term ISO. Mastering the use of ISO can significantly improve your digital photography skills. This post presents the concept of ISO in a very insightful way. Keep reading on…

What exactly is ISO ?

It can be considered as a unit of digital photography that measures the sensitivity of your camera’s optical sensor towards light. That is; for a higher ISO number, your camera will be more sensitive towards light and for a lower ISO number, your camera will be less sensitive towards light. Consequently, for a high ISO (more sensitivity towards light) the camera shutter will snap rapidly (allowing light to enter for a very small duration). In other words, high ISO results in short exposure time (ex – 1/400 of a second).
Similarly, for a low ISO (less sensitivity towards light) the camera shutter will snap slowly (allowing light to enter for a very large duration). As a result, low ISO results in long exposure time (ex – 1/5 of a second).

Choosing the right ISO settings for your pictures

a) Light sensitivity point of view
Since an ISO number reflects how sensitive your camera is towards light, consider using a high ISO when shooting under insufficient or low light conditions. Similarly, consider using a low ISO when shooting under ample of light conditions. Use of a very low ISO must be avoided as this results in blurry photos being captured even with slightest of shake while holding the camera (Reason: Lower ISO results in longer exposure time)

b) Exposure point of view
While shooting a scene where you want to display motion in your photograph, consider using a low ISO (which results in longer exposure time and motion blur). For example; capturing motion of a speeding car, a drifting subway metro or anything which inspires you to capture the motion. Similarly, consider the use of high ISO when you want a still photograph without any motion blur. For example; while performing baby photography which involves a lot of rapid movements or any sports event where you want to freeze the motion.

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Problems with Low and High ISO settings

Using high and low ISO has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. We have covered most of the advantages in the aforementioned paragraphs, now we will discuss some of the key disadvantages of using an ISO number which is set too high or too low in magnitude.

Too high ISO is the main cause of noise in photographs and too low ISO is the main cause of blur in photographs.

Possible solutions are:

1. To eliminate noisy effect due to high ISO – Use a high speed camera lens or use noise ninja application to eliminate the noise.

2. To eliminate blurry effect due to low ISO – Use a tripod coupled with remote controlled capturing (since under low ISO settings, even the slightest of shake while pressing the shoot button triggers blur)

ISO and noise example:

 

   

For a DSLR camera, a change in ISO directly affects the exposure triangle where one has to readjust the other two parameters accordingly – Aperture and Shutter Speed.

Most of the photographers set their camera to auto mode where the ISO is automatically adjusted to an appropriate value in accordance to the scene being captured. ISO plays a very important role in digital photography and its appropriate use should be mastered for capturing amazing photos regardless of what the shooting conditions are !

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DSLR Photography basics – Aperture, shutter speed and ISO

This photography post is exclusively for beginners who have just bought a brand new DSLR. While shooting with the automatic mode is fairly easy, the manual mode of your DSLR camera can be daunting — it’s a challenge just to figure out which buttons to push! Shooting with the manual mode of your DSLR unlocks the true potential of the camera with main adjustable parameters like aperture, shutter-speed and ISO. Therefore It’s necessary that you get yourself acquainted with these three basic foundations of DSLR photography.

After going through this post, you will be able to figure out - how to configure your DSLR in the manual mode while shooting in a variety of conditions. Now let’s take a look at each of them in detail with illustrative examples.

Foundation of DSLR photography – Aperture, shutter speed and ISO

1. Aperture

The aperture of your DSLR is the opening of the lens. Think of the way the human eye contracts and expands to let light in or keep light out. The lens of a camera works in a similar way. The wider the opening (or f-stop) is, the more light enters your camera. The narrower it is, the less light enters your camera. If your aperture set to a 3.5, for example, it means it’s open wide. If your aperture is a 28, it’s closed to a very small opening.

The aperture affects something called the depth of focus, or depth of field. This is basically how much of your photograph is in-focus, and how much of it is blurred. You’d use a large aperture (remember, that means a low number and open wide) for portrait shots, or any photograph in which you want the background to be blurry in order to draw attention to a focal point.

Examples where larger aperture value is preferred (subject in focus with a blurry background)

You’d use a smaller aperture for landscape shots, for example. That way, more of the photo is in focus, and you have less of a chance for a blurry photograph.

2. Shutter speed

This is basically what it sounds like — how fast your shutter snaps. When the shutter is open, it allows light inside your camera. The longer the shutter speed, the longer the camera is exposed to light, and the brighter your image will be. However, you have to maintain a delicate balance with shutter speed. As a general rule, when hand-holding a camera, it’s best not to go below 1/125^th of a second. If you go longer than that, for example, 1/50^th of a second, you have a much greater risk of your photos being blurry and shaky.

For action shots, like sports and fast-moving objects, you’ll want to have a fast shutter speed. Also, if the day is very bright, increase the shutter speed to bring the exposure back to normal. Slow shutter speeds are for darker settings — like city landscapes at night. However, you’ll need a tripod to avoid blur.

3. ISO

The ISO of your camera is basically how sensitive it is to light. So, the higher the ISO, the brighter your image. However, this comes at a price. As you increase the ISO number, the graininess of the photograph increases, and the quality decreases. There are several professional ways you can reduce noise in post-processing, but you’ll want to be careful to avoid going too high if you can.

For example, on a bright, sunny day, you’ll probably only need an ISO of about 200 - 300. At dusk or evening time, you might need an ISO of 800. And for night landscapes, you could need an ISO of 1600 or higher.

Remember that aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are all linked. If you change one setting, it’s likely that you’ll need to change the other settings to balance it out. For this very reason, these parameters are often linked to a term called – exposure triangle.

 

Understanding the Exposure Triangle – the art of balancing aperture, shutter speed and ISO

For example, if you’re photographing a group of rowdy, fast-moving children, you may need to increase your shutter speed to prevent blur. When you do this, however, you’ll find that the photo becomes darker because the light isn’t entering the camera as long. So the two options are: open your aperture wider, or increase the ISO. Let’s say your aperture is already wide open — 3.5 or so. The only thing you can do is increase the ISO — let’s say to 500. Now you have a photograph that isn’t blurry, it’s bright, and it doesn’t have a lot of noise. This is quality photography, and it’s important to maintain the balance. All the aspects need to complement each other to create a beautiful work of art.

It might seem difficult at first to keep track of all these different features of manual photography, but once you start practicing, you’ll realize that it’s actually fairly simple. You start to acquire a natural feel for it after a while. Soon you’ll be adjusting settings easily and snapping professional-looking shots. Keep working at it — practice makes perfect. Good luck!

Kailyn Nickel

About the Guest Author:
Kailyn Nickel writes at her personal photography blog - A New Rebel. She owns a Nikon D5000 and is well grounded in the basics of digital SLR photography. She hopes that you will find this photography guide pretty much interesting and intelligible.

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How do megapixels affect digital picture quality

Do megapixels really make a difference ? How the effective megapixels of a digital camera relate to the picture quality ? Do increased number of pixels increase the digital picture quality and vice versa ? These are some of the frequently asked questions that certainly perplex the buyers who are not much into this business !

What is a megapixel ?

Technically speaking, a megapixel comprises of 1 million pixels or 1000000 pixels in an image, where a pixel being the smallest unit that forms the image you see on the screen. So when someone says that he has a 2 megapixel camera, then it means that the camera is able to capture an image with 2000000 pixel count. Quite clearly, as the number of pixels( or megapixels) on a digital picture increase, the level of detail in the digital picture and the size also do increase proportionally. Megapixel can be thought of as the basic unit to measure a digital picture. I believe that was enough to get a noob acquainted with – what is a megapixel and how does it relates to the digital picture ?

For example – consider this star icon…

When it is zoomed to maximum level in windows photo viewer, each pixel of this icon becomes visible (and the total number of these pixels expressed in the form of 1 million gives the effective megapixels)

Ok..now that you have well understood the fundamental explanation of a megapixel, lets move ahead and see how the number of megapixels are related to the digital picture quality…

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Megapixels and Digital picture quality

For a given size and resolution of a screen, you can’t really figure out the difference between the image qualities of two photos captured with different resolutions from the same camera. A 10 megapixel photo on a 3.2 inch screen seems to have almost the same quality as a 14 megapixel photo would have on the same screen.

So it’s a myth that higher megapixels lead to higher image quality. Indeed, image quality is only affected by the nature of camera lens used. For example – a picture taken at 5 megapixel resolution using a mobile phone camera will be a bit inferior to the same picture captured with a digital camera (point and shoot or DSLR)

Two photos are uploaded below (the left photo is captured using 5 MP resolution and the right photo is captured using a 10 MP resolution). It’s clear - you can’t distinguish the image quality of the two photos, though they have been captured with entirely different resolutions.

 

So the question arises…

When are higher megapixels needed ?

Higher megapixels are only required when one needs to obtain really good quality prints of their pictures. Remember that higher the megapixels or resolution of the camera, the more details the picture will contain. So capturing photos with a higher megapixels camera has an advantage only when you need to take superior quality prints of your digital photos. Furthermore, a higher resolution image when resized or compressed, looks better and contain more details as compared to the one resized or compressed with a low resolution.

When and how does image quality gets affected ?

Both the images are now resized/compressed down to 80% using Adobe Photoshop and the megapixel effect is analyzed by zooming in to 500% in Photoshop.

It’s clearly seen that the image which was captured with 10 megapixel resolution (the photo on the right side) still contains more details (more number of pixels) as compared to the one captured with lower resolution (the photo on the left side). This is the only way, one can distinguish between the image quality of two photos with different resolutions.

 

Quite obviously, large sized and superfine quality prints do require higher number of megapixels !!

I believe that this post fulfills its purpose and educates the readers with a much broader concept of megapixels and their relation to the digital picture quality !!

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Rule of thirds in photography

The rule of thirds in photography is the first basic rule taught to all those who are learning photography at elementary level. The rule of thirds is applied to get perfect composition in the photos being captured.

 

Definition of the RULE OF THIRDS:

Although one can easily get the perfect definition of the rule of thirds on Wikipedia, here is a more concise and intelligible definition of the rule…

“According to the rule of thirds, while framing a shot, viewing through the camera LCD or DSLR view-finder, divide your picture into nine equal parts formed by two grid lines, two of which run horizontally while the remaining two run vertically. Now adjust your camera in such a way that the subject of interest lies exactly on any of these grid lines or on their point of intersection”

 

A picture perfectly composed with the help of this rule interacts with the viewer vibrantly. Now that doesn’t mean that one has to strictly follow this rule every time while framing shots to get great pictures. This rule is just to obtain great compositions in the photos which is the key essence if you are framing shots professionally.

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Some examples of THE RULE OF THIRDS:



In the above example illustrating the rule of thirds, our subject of interest is the swing and the track on which it slides. Hence we position our camera in such a way that these two elements (the swing and the track) lie on any of these grid lines (here both of these elements lie on vertical grid lines). The composition would have been far better if the swing and the railing lied on the point of intersection of these grid lines. 

 In this another example of the rule of thirds, the elements of interest includes the handle and the adjacent wooden frames junction. Hence the camera is positioned such that the grid lines lie on these two elements (the lower horizontal lie on the handle while the second vertical lie on the adjacent junction).

I hope that after going through this post you have gained the basic knowledge of the rule of thirds in photography.

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Aperture And Shutter Speed - Basics Of Digital Photography

Update: For more detailed explanation on aperture and shutter speed – do visit DSLR photography basics.

 

Aperture and shutter speed constitute the basics of digital photography. These two terms are the most sought after by almost all new digital camera owners who are trying to improve their photography skills. Gaining a better understanding of aperture and shutter speed basics definitely helps one to enhance his photography skills over time. So in this post i am going to discuss in detail about the basic concepts behind the two main photography pillars - Aperture and Shutter Speed.

APERTURE

It's somewhat akin to your pupil. Aperture shows how wide is your camera lens and how much light is exposing to it. Aperture is literally a hole through which light enters after it passes camera lens.The size of the hole can be altered to manage the amount of light being exposed to your camera sensors. Wide aperture means large amount of light is exposing to your camera sensors and small aperture means less light is exposing to your camera sensors. Aperture is used in conjugation with shutter speed and it is used to manage the depth of field.

Aperture is represented in the terms of F numbers. The greater is the number associated with F, the smaller will be the aperture. As you can see in the image aperture is largest in case of f2 and smallest in case of f16. Now a days almost all digital cameras provides an option to change aperture.  

The above image clearly explain the effects of wide aperture and narrow aperture.

SHUTTER SPEED

Shutter Speed shows for how long the camera lens is exposed to the light. Suppose you want to click a fast moving vehicle or you need to capture the very detail of a falling star you need a wide aperture so that large amount of light is exposed to your camera lens.
The shutter speed scales engraved on the shutter speed dial of digital camera bodies with a shutter speed ring OR via some digital numerals on the LCD screen like: 1/8000, 1/4000, 1/1000, 1/500, 1/250, 1/125, 1/60, 1/30, 1/15, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1 etc.   
    
The above photo was provided by Kailyn Nickel of anewrebel while contributing a guest post here on - DSLR tips

Now that the effect of shutter speed is conspicuous, different shutter speed will yield different kind of photographic effect. Faster shutter speed will take the shot at that particular instant while the slower shutter speed will blur the image and shows the speed of movement of a particular subject.  If you want to shoot a trail of something such as a falling star then go for slower shutter speed and if you want to take the image at a particular instant such as sporty action then go for faster shutter speed.

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Digital Camera photos too bright? Here’s the solution

It is really annoying when a digital camera produces too much bright pictures, often distracting the subject in focus. There are 2 possible solutions that are worth trying under such circumstances :

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Reason 1: Too bright pictures due to high ISO

Solution 1: Check your ISO settings. Under high ISO value, It's quite usual for the camera to capture too bright pictures, if the camera is set to use flash. Set the ISO of camera to small value while using the flash. The problem would be solved.

These shots illustrate how a higher value of ISO on camera while using flash can spoil the whole photo..

     

Reason 2: Too bright pictures due to brightness control settings

Solution 2: Check the brightness control settings of the digital camera. You will notice something like EV on it. It is used to control the brightness of pictures being captured. Set it to a lower value and check if the problem still persists.

Miscellaneous Reasons and Solutions:

If none of the above solution works, then the camera flash itself is causing problems.
Solution 3: Try to capture images by turning off your camera flash and setting the ISO to it's highest value( quite obviously this trick wont work if you are capturing images in darkness )

Solution 4: If using the camera flash is a necessity, then try to capture images by temporarily placing a small bit of paper on the camera flash. This trick must work

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