Quick Tips: Using depth of field Video
Quick Tips: Using depth of field Video Transcript
>> I'm Brian Cooley with the Quick Tip on taking better photos with your digital camera using depth of field. Controlling depth of field is very simple. It means you're deciding how much is in focus. Is it a shallow area from front to back or a deep area from front to almost infinity. By doing so, you can bring, let's say a close up photo more into emphasis or you can let an entire landscape be in focus. It depends on the shot you're taking and what effect you want. Here's the basic principle. If you shoot with a small f-stop like 1.8, you're gonna get a very large wide open lens iris, as you can see here. If I go to a large f-stop or a small aperture, same thing like f/16, you can see here that when a picture's taken I get a very small iris and that gives me more depth, just a basic photo thing. For example, if I want to take a picture of this little branch right here, but I've got a lot of messy city scene behind me, in the standard settings, I kinda get everything in focus and it's really distracting. In this case though, I'm gonna override the aperture. I'm gonna go to a 2.8 in this case and again, you do that differently on different cameras, if you can. I'm gonna take the same shot again, much better. You see, I've got the background more blurred-out, more pushed to the back and my subject feels like it's more in the front. A couple ways to do this is, you either can look for a manual aperture setting on your digital camera like on this one. If you don't have that, look for a menu that will allow you to change the aperture or the shutter and if you have a faster shutter, you're going to end up with a more open aperture or a lower f number. It's a little complicated, but there are various ways to get there. Your camera will vary on how you do it, but just remember, if the iris is open wide, you have shallow depth of field, if the iris is small, a high f number, you have great depth of field. Play around with it and I guarantee you're gonna get some really cool results and great emphasis taking better digital photos. Thanks for joining me for this Quick Tip.
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