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Posted by Mike Graham on July 26, 2001 at 01:05:22:
In Reply to: F100 posted by Andy on July 25, 2001 at 13:19:01:
Andy,
Depth of field is the area of your subject, at whatever distance you're focused on, that will appear sharp in the photo. Setting a large f-stop (like f-1.8) on the lens only gives you very narrow depth of field, but a small f-stop (like f-16) gives you a lot more.
Let's say you're focused on a garden chair about two meters away from you. At f-1.8 only the chair will be sharp, and the background will appear blurred. But stopped down to f-16, without changing the focus, depth of field extends all the way to infinity.
So how can you tell how much is going to be in focus? This is where that little depth of field button comes in handy. Press it, and, unless the aperture is set wide open at f-1.8 or whatever the maximum is on your lens, the picture in your viewfinder will appear to get darker. But if you look closer, you'll notice that the background looks sharper now than it appeared before.
Experiment with different f-stops, and you'll quickly get the idea. The DOF preview is a valuable tool for checking how the final photo will look.
However, like everything in life, there's a trade-off. A small aperture gives you plenty of depth of field but you need a long shutter speed - slow speeds might put you on a tripod. A wide aperture gives you almost no depth of field but allows the use of fast shutter speeds.
Nothing's perfect, is it?
Mike
Hope this helps!
Mike
end of archived message
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