Aperture and Depth of Field:
  experiments with aperture settings and what I learned

The joy of digital cameras!  I deleted lots of pictures until I figured out what I was doing. The photos that I decided to use for this blog assignment were mostly taken on a sunny day with an ISO setting of 100. I found that I had the widest range of f-stops with the ISO set as low as possible.

f3.5  1/320

I started this series of photos with an f 3.5, which required a shutter speed of 1/320. If the shutter speed was slower, too much light would have been allowed in and the picture would have been overexposed. As you see, this produced an image that is sharp around the white flowers, but blurred on the green leaves. An f-stop of 3.5 means that the aperture (opening) was as large as it was possible for me to get. With a different lens, I could have gotten an aperture that was even larger (smaller f-stop number) and then there would have been even more blurring of the background.

f4  1/200

The aperture is getting smaller here, so the shutter speed has to be slower to let in enough light for proper exposure. The white flowers are still in focus, and the leaves are more in focus too, because the depth of field is a bit longer. 

f6.3  1/100

Now the f-stop number is getting bigger, which means the aperture is getting smaller, and the exposure time is getting longer. The depth of field is longer too, putting more of the subject in focus.

 

 

 

 

 

f8  1/60

Finally, the last shot of this series has the smallest aperture I could achieve. Accordingly, the shutter speed is very slow, to allow more light to enter. The entire photo is in focus; the depth of field is as long as it can be. There is a distinct difference between the first and last photos of this series. I might use the settings on the first photo if I wanted to emphasize the flower, or the settings of the last photo to show what the plant looks like overall.

 

 

 

f3.5  1/1600

The next series, taken the same day, was taken with the macro zoom lens operating. I was very stealthy and was able to get pretty close. Actually, I was lying in the driveway.

 

 

 

 

f8  1/400

The second photo, with the f 8 setting is the better of the two as far as seeing the whole grasshopper detail. In the first picture, the foreground in blurred due to the wide aperture. I could have avoided this by focusing on the bug more closely. 

 

 

 

 

 

f4  1/50

 

f8  1/13

I messed up on these last two, (which were actually the first two I took.) The ISO was set at 400, and that was wrong because of the amount of available light, I think. It maybe should have been 600. Also, the camera focused on the lamp base on the right instead of just the china doll. I could fix this by cropping it out of the first picture, where because I wanted the emphasis to be on the doll only I used a low f-stop number. That was as low as I could get under the circumstances.