Depth of Field

(Darn, I knew I was forgetting something! You're right of course...)
 
With a Point and Shoot, you're flat-out going to have less control over your depth of field than you would if you were using a decent SLR. Your problem is it's not going to tell you what your DOF is actually going to BE.

Also, Point and Shoots tend to have pretty Wide Angle Lenses, which will screw with your Depth of Field - even if you're zoomed in all the way.

A normal SLR has a bunch of information printed on the lense that you use for DOF and even range-finding. (while I'm thinking of it, I find that shooting at F8 takes care of the background on many shots, but isn't so bad as to be annoying - but that's with a 50mm lense on up and with a far-away background.)

Ok, on my 50mm lense I focus on my subject - the lense says it's 7 feet away. It has hash-marks based on the f-stop you choose, telling you exactly what you're DOF will be. So, I choose F4. These hash-marks tell me that at F4, about 6 3/4' to about 8' from me is going to be in focus. At F16, you're looking at from 5' to 12.5' from ME.

A wide angle lense, like my 28mm, will be much harder to blur out the background. At F16 at the same distance, the DOF goes from 3' from me to infinity. So, everything that's more than 3' in front of me is going to be in Focus.

As I mentioned before, your biggest problem is that your camera probably won't be able to tell you where your Depth of Field is.
 
Some point-n-shoots do have "portrait" and "landscape" modes. Portrait mode is short DOF, and landscape is long DOF, at least within the limitations of the lighting and film speed.
 

Most reactions

New Topics

Back
Top