Lens Love

Last weekend, when mom and I went down to see PW, we also stopped by Houston Camera Exchange. I was hoping they'd have a C-Lux 3 in store for her to play around with, but they didn't. She ended up getting a Nikon Coolpix, her very first digital camera! While she was looking at those, I asked the Nikon rep if I could play with some of the lenses that were out on display. She put the 50mm f/1.4 AF-S lens on my D40 and I just about died. I was wearing a scarf/shawl I'd just finished, so I put it on the counter to play around:



Look at that depth of field! Wowza! Do want, very badly.

Also, just for kicks, I did the auto-lighten in Picasa on that pic:



I think it blows out the colors a bit, but shows off the texture more nicely. What do you think?

Aperture Study

I've been trying to sneak in a post for awhile, and Donna's comment encouraged me to up and write it already! (Go check her out; not only does she have her own wonderful site, but she's contributing to the new PW Photography. Sweet!) A while ago, Jessica asked about the blurry background in some of the flower pics I took on campus. She was absolutely correct that it was caused by the aperture settings on my camera. (Does anyone else always want to spell it aperature? I guess I just pronounce it incorrectly with a bit of a Southern flair and put that extra syllable in there.)

The aperture is basically the hole in the lens that lets light in. Normally it's closed, but it opens to a predetermined size when you take a picture. When you're using a dSLR you can control the aperture size in the Manual and Aperture-priority settings. The wider the aperture (which corresponds to a smaller f/ number), the shallower the depth of field. A shallower/smaller depth of field corresponds to a smaller in-focus area in the image. Here is a series of images I took at Avery Island to illustrate the effect a change in aperture can have:


f/25.0, the smallest aperture setting here, the largest depth of field


f/13.0


f/7.1, see how the background is getting blurry?


f/6.3


f/5.6, the largest aperture here, and thus the most shallow depth of field

In PW form, here are the first and last next to each other for comparison:


See the difference in the background, and even the leaves in the foreground?

A couple random things about aperture. As you might expect (or already know), the wider the aperture, the more light is let in. You can then use a faster shutter speed, letting you take crisper, clearer photos (although, blur can be good). Also, if you are using a zoom lens, your maximum aperture will change in relation to the focal length you're using. On my kit lens, the range of maximums is from f/5.6 when it's at 55mm to f/3.5 when it's at 18mm. The f/3.5 setting lets in more light, so it's useful in low-light situations. If you can't get the exact composition you want, you can always creatively crop. (Photo editing is your friend!)

Someday, I hope to get a macro lens and then really rock out the fun with depth of field, in photos like this:


Image by Flickr user ecstaticist, used under terms of CC License.

And with that, fun time is up. Time to get back to work! Hope y'all have a great week! =)

Wild Roses, and Depth of Field

I took a ton of flower pictures this summer, because I love flowers, and because there were so many. Northeast New Mexico has been in a drought for a long time, at least as long as I can remember. This past year, however, was really wet, and some of the old-timers think this is going to keep up for at least the next few years. *crosses fingers* That would be excellent, if true. Enough water means so many good things for the region, including great flowers! We had more wildflowers this summer than I've seen in ten years of going to Philmont, and luckily I had my sweet new camera to capture them.

Over the course of this blog, you'll probably see most of the good ones (or you can go check them out on Flickr...see the sidebar badge), but for now, here are two pictures of the same flower, a wild rose, and a mini-photography lesson.

Disclaimer: I know very very little about photography. But I am capable of reading (thank goodness) and am teaching myself, little by little. To learn more, click here and here.

Ok. Back to the photos:

Do you see the difference? In the top photo, the petals are in focus. In the bottom one, the stamens are. I like the bottom one better, because...well, I don't really know why, I just do. This is one of the things I really like about my D40, is that I have control over where to focus. I also have control over depth of field.

Now, up until about three days ago, I didn't really understand depth of field or aperture settings or how they are connected. I always got shutter speed, because that makes sense to me. (The faster the speed, the less light comes in, the darker the pictures. And vice versa.) I shot on S a lot, and let the camera control aperture. I had a vague idea that aperture had to do with how wide the lens opened to let in light, but didn't really understand how that made a difference. I decided that I should probably learn. I found these two great articles (one and two) and they made a ton of sense. I also liked the Wikipedia article on aperture because it explains the math. (Yay math!)

Which got me thinking about the flower pics. I reckoned that the aperture must have been set very wide (which corresponds to a low number...) to get such a shallow depth of field that I could have either the petals or the stamens in focus, but not both. So I zipped over to Flickr and checked out the Exif data (for some reason I prefer to look at it on Flickr instead of on my computer...don't ask me why...), and sure enough, the aperture for both was f/5.3, which is close to the max for my lens at that zoom level. This means the lens opened really wide to let in a lot of light, and, as I suspected, made the depth of field very shallow. Cool!

I hope you enjoyed this mini-lesson, and that it made sense. Please feel free to comment and let me know other cool things about aperture, depth of field, wild roses, etc. (Also, please let me know (kindly!) if I have said anything incorrect.) Ooh, and if you know how to blog multiple Flickr photos into one post (I can only figure out how to get one photo in the post using 'blog this'), please please let me know!

Thanks y'all! Have a great week! =)