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January 11, 2011
aperture and depth of field
A question that came up in the forum recently was whether an 70-200mm f4 zoom would give you the same kind of look that an f2.8 zoom would.
For me, the f2.8 aperture is essential, especially with a telephoto zoom. For the same scenario, it gives me a higher shutter speed than the f4 zoom. Or I can use a lower ISO. More importantly, since I often bounce flash in large areas, the f2.8 aperture gives me more chance of successfully bouncing my flash than an f4 aperture would.
But what does the change in depth-of-field look like?
Keeping in mind that the how much the background appears to be blurred, depends on a few things:
– the chosen aperture. The wider the aperture, the shallower the depth-of-field will be, giving a more blurry the background. (This is the main factor that affects how much the background will be blurred.)
– how far your subject is from the background,
– your chosen focal length.
– The bokeh of the lens will also affect whether the background appears more blurred, or less. (Note that bokeh and shallow depth-of-field are not the same thing.)
The change in depth-of-field is incremental. If you had to look at a photograph showing amazingly thin depth-of-field, you wouldn’t be able to tell just from the photograph alone, whether f2 was used or f2.8 … but a side-by-side comparison will reveal the answer. An individual image won’t. However, it will be obvious when an image was shot at f 8 or f11 (on a 200mm lens for example), compared to either f2 or f2.8 … we should be able to recognize that a shallow depth-of-field was not used on the f8 or f11 image.
There are hordes of examples of how depth-of-field changes with aperture. But I thought it might be interesting to see with an overlay of images, just how much the depth-of-field appears to change …
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January 7, 2011
Kate – a photo shoot in New York
Kate is from Ukraine and has a deep fascination for New York. As a present, Kate’s sister flew both of them out for a vacation here … and had me photograph Kate around New York yesterday. The idea was to get a mixture of portraits of Kate and some photos of Kate in obvious New York locales.
We started off in the Meat-Packing district because I wanted a photogenic spot that wasn’t too crowded during a weekday (in winter), so we could have an easy start to the photo session. Since Kate might not have been experienced with photo shoots, I thought this would be the gentlest start. From there we wandered around a few other chosen spots.
Shooting on my own, I brought along a 70-200mm f2.8 and a 24-70mm f2.8 and two speedlights. Even though this winter’s day was slightly overcast, giving us soft light, I still didn’t want to rely entirely on just the available light …
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January 6, 2011
‘Hyper-Manual’ mode for Nikon and Canon
(subtitled: the episode where I finally learn now to use the Auto modes elegantly)
In my discussion of what would be the best camera in the world, I mentioned (at length) the clear advantage that Pentax cameras have because of their Hyper-Program and Hyper-Manual modes. I explain these two modes in more detail in that linked article, but in essence, the modes work as such:
Hyper-Program – is a program exposure mode, but by dialing the shutter speed dial it becomes Shutter Priority / Tv. By dialing the aperture dial, you instantly have Aperture Priority / Av. Very simple implementation. And very elegant.
Hyper-Manual – is manual exposure mode like we’re used to. But you can hit the Exposure Lock button, and then when you change the aperture, the shutter speed setting follows. If you change the shutter speed then, the aperture follows. Absolutely wonderful for when you have correct exposure. You can now get a different working aperture or shutter speed, and still have the same exposure value. Less twisting of dials.
Since I don’t shoot much outside of Manual exposure mode, I don’t have experience with finessing the automatic modes. Then Eric Schwab wrote in to tell me how he implements Aperture Priority with his Nikon cameras, to get something akin to Hyper-Manual mode with his Nikon cameras. I checked on my Canon 5D, and it works the same way.
I’m sure it might take a short while for finger-memory to kick in, but I can easily see how this could be a standard way of shooting.
This might not be news to most photographers who regularly use Aperture Priority / Av, but I’d like to put the information out here anyway …
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January 5, 2011
children’s studio portrait – lighting setup and post-processing
The lighting setup was very simple. Mostly because there wasn’t much space in the area where I set up my home-studio in my dining room area. But also, because a complicated lighting setup wasn’t necessary. Just two lights. One light on my subject – this adorable little girl; the other light on my background.
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January 2, 2011
The flagship articles on flash photography techniques was (and probably still is) the backbone of this blog. But since I posted the first few pages on flash photography on planetneil back in 2006, my own understanding and technique have steadily improved, as has my writing style.
Part of my list of things-to-do this year then, is to update the older pages. The images especially needed to be updated. Stronger images, and with less of a wedding bias. Although the techniques can be applied to pretty much any field of photography, I think that some people might have been dissuaded from reading further when they saw the site predominantly featured wedding photography. For this reason, I’ve also made an effort in the past year or two to bring a much wider spread to the range of topics here.
And with that, first up for a face-lift is the page on how to bounce flash. While much of the material will be very familiar to regular readers of this blog, hopefully with new images, and adjusted text and links to other articles deeper in the site, it will be a welcome refresher on the topic.
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Comments (11)
January 1, 2011
When I posted a thank you note last year with the Google Analytics map, it felt wonderful to know that the Tangents blog reached such a wide audience across the world. Out of curiosity, I had to see how the same three month period for 2010 would compare. Well, in the last quarter of 2009 there were over 251,000 visitors to the Tangents blog …. and for the same period (Oct-Dec) in 2010 there were over 372,000 visitors! That is nearly a 50% increase in the number of visits to the Tangents blog in a year’s time!
I am equally stunned and thrilled and humbled by this. Thank you! Thank you to everyone who commented and helped, and added advice and info and helped turn this blog into something to be very proud of. And thank you to everyone who passed this website on to photographer friends.
This is all wonderful motivation to keep expanding this site, and the range of topics. I look forward to 2011.
As a side-note, I see that last year this time I mentioned the avalanche of emails, and was determined to catch up on them. I never quite did. But now with the forum, there’s actually hope that I can more effectively reply to questions and keep in touch.
Neil vN
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Filed under: news — Neil vN @ 8:57 pm
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