Friday, April 11, 2014

Focus on Life:Moment of Focus

Exploring a Shallow Depth of Field.


When Sally Russick set our April Moment of Focus photo prompt, a chance to explore using our cameras to capture a picture with shallow depth of field, I warmed to the task of doing something a bit more technical with my camera, which has manual as well as automatic settings. I read Sally's hints, I even read my camera
 manual. I was set.

But, as with other times that I have tried to "go manual" with the camera's settings,   I found that what that camera is best at is doing things on automatic. With an infinite depth of field. Above is the closest I could come with some of the options on the camera.  So I got going in the Picmonkey editing site, and came up with these reasonable facsimiles of altered depth of field. Sally made a video about using Pixlr's photo editing to blur the background, but my computer does not seem to like to play those videos. And frankly, using Pixlr is beyond my capabilities. 

Focal Pixelate

Spotlight

Zoom Blur

Maybe some day I will get the hang of using depth of field to improve my photography. I kind of like that last one. And did you notice what the subject is? Daffodil buds! Spring!!





9 comments:

  1. The daffodils have been blooming here all week, and It makes me so happy! I like the different blur effects you did, especially the zoom blur. Very cool!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love the different effects you tried on these beautiful daffodils!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beautiful daffodils, wish I had some :) Great effects on those photos.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I like the last one too! I am right there with you on the puzzles of photography. My camera has a program mode "P" which seems to give me good results if I play around with the settings. I think it's a happy medium between manual and automatic. Your daffodils look like the are just ready to pop!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great photos! I like all the effects you used. I can't find my manual and have not mastered this depth of field yet.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My manual exists only as a PDF file on my hard drive. I think the camera came with a disc, and it was on there. But it has not been very helpful getting me out of "automatic."

      Delete
  6. Oh you've had fun with these photos - great effects!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Beti you found a good subject for your photos. I like the zoom blur best too.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think Spring may actually be strong enough now to beat Winter back

    ReplyDelete