Monthly Meeting - DOF Workshop, David Boyd and Ed Episcopo

Details:

Monthly Topic:

We did this workshop about two years ago and it's a topic that is important to all forms of photography. We will also discuss focus stacking and focus peaking, which are tools that can help you get the DOF you need.

In lieu of meeting handouts, you can view/print information for this meeting by clicking the following Dropbox link:

Depth Of Field Document

Please bring your camera, any lens and a tripod. We will be photographing individual flowers and possibly other objects, not to get pretty images, but to learn to use simple techniques to capture better images.

There will be about a fifteen minute discussion covering the techniques we will use to control the DOF and the background. A few sample images will be displayed to demonstrate how the techniques can be used. DOF is the area that will be in focus in your image.

We will place one or more flowers in a small container on each of the meeting room tables. A tripod will be necessary to capture sharp images with small apertures and indoor lighting. We don’t want to use prepared backgrounds and studio lighting, since it will defeat the purpose of this exercise.

Techniques to experiment with:

Move around to get the best and least distracting background. Going low is often a good start.

Change your aperture to increase or decrease your image DOF and to control how your background looks.

Change your focal length. Zoom in to decrease DOF and to reduce the field of view, so there is less background to deal with.

Move closer to the subject. If you move to the minimum focus distance for your lens, you will reduce DOF and maximize background blur.

Change the distance from your subject to the background. If your background is farther away, there will be more background blur.

If your camera has the focus stacking and focus peaking features, try those features to increase your DOF or to blur a close background while keeping the main subject sharp front to back.

If there's enough time:

Use your camera's Live-View feature to zoom in and manually focus on a specific part of the subject. AF will not always give you the focus area you expect. This is more of a factor in close-up photography.

Combine all of the above techniques to get the image you want.

If you don't feel like participating in the exercise, you're still welcome to attend and to participate in the discussion.

***

Monthly Critique:

There will be no critique for this meeting and the critique time will be used for the workshop and to pack our equipment after we finish.

See you there...

The leadership team.