Depth of Field Question

weepete · Jan 22, 2014

TCampbell said:
weepete said:

Yep, boy and dog were shot on a different background, the uneaven dof in the foreground gives it away. That is some custom PS work. Looking at her images she knows how to hide the blend well between to different images.

There's a few shots like the little kid on the pier that are cute but no way that shot is real. Not every shot in her portfolio is PSed though, I think there are a few with clever use of delibetatley angled DOF.

Question is does that make these imagesit's a bit seem like its a bit of a cheat?

Click to expand...

Not necessarily... you'd have to go read their tutorials on how to interpret analysis. I ran my own image (the candle on the rug -- which I deliberately didn't touch with anything just to see what would happen.)

It turns out the different brightnesses of the pixels simply mean the JPEG compression has changed. This will NORMALLY happen on areas with sharper edges. When I run the candle through the analysis (it's a pain to do it with an image posted to this site... I did it yesterday by uploading to Flickr, running the analysis against that site, then deleting it (it's not like I want this test-shot in my stream). If someone wants to run it through, have at it (it's just a test shot).

What I saw was that each of the "holes" in the candle had a bit of a highlight around each edge. The potpourri around the base of the candle also shoed up brightly (lots of sharp edges down there). Also... a line extended all the way across the scene in the area where the rug comes into sharp focus.

I suspect the dog and boy probably had sharpening applied. You could always test this with any of your images... just upload an untouched image, upload it and do an analysis, then apply sharpening to an area and repeat. I suspect you'll see the sharpened area shows up brightly.

I wasn't talking about the anyalysis mate, just looking at the DOF in her Flickr image and the way it wraps round the boy and the dog instead of being a straight line like in your example. Now that I've looked at it again the blending between the two different layers in the foreground is really obvious and it stands out quite a bit.

timor · Jan 22, 2014

Thanks Braineack. Sharp eyes.
We debate it, I guess, because she is a surprise. Innocent story, beautiful pictures and a lot of work like for just an amateur, a loving mother just shooting some memories of her kids. Why to make false memories ? Just trying out the skills for something bigger ? Making a name for herself ? You know, in the story is not that important who, where, when but why.

Derrel · Jan 22, 2014

Apparently, this woman is trying to paint herself as a "newbie who hit it big-time." You know--a woman who had never picked up a camera until recently, and is now hitting home runs, working in solitude on some forlorn Russian farm, happily snapping piccies of her darling kids and the animals that live there with them in peace and harmony in the Russian hinterlands. You know...it's a really,really great story. The overnight sensation made it big story.

Riiiiight, yeah. Sure. Gotta love the story underlying this. Key word, underlying...

The pics are interesting though. Amazing how she got so amazingly good in such a minimal amount of time. I mean, she must be unbelievably talented.

This is exactly the kind of story the click-bait sites like PetaPixel love to plaster all over their front page, which is where I first saw this almost-unbelievable story about this Russian mother.

Braineack · Jan 22, 2014

I don't even care how she creates them, still great.

But I mean, they are CLEARLY shopped.

timor · Jan 22, 2014

Derrel said:
The pics are interesting though. Amazing how she got so amazingly good in such a minimal amount of time. I mean, she must be unbelievably talented.

talented she is, but do not believe in handicapped angels.
Sashbar wrote in: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/...pictures-her-two-kids-animals-her-farm-3.html

"She is an architect, graduated from Moscow Architecture Institute. This is an academic institution, that means 5 years of a rather broad and intensive education, including art, history of art, design etc. It involves a lot of drawing , painting etc. So she must be well versed in formal things like Bauhaus principles and aestetic, composition, color, shapes, contrasts, perspective, space organisation, landscaping and forms. As for digital photography, I could not find any traces of intensive training. She bought her first camera in 2012, as she says. Re photography itself it looks like she was completely self taught, just a mother of two sitting home with her kids. And her portfolio is quite small for a serious portraiture pro. Very few images outside her own kids. But the speed of her progressing from simply good shots, that would be praised on this forum, to her later work, that is verging on art, is just staggering. She is claiming that photography became her second profession. She has her own kids photographer blog and a Facebook page that states she is a professional photographer. From what I see she is just trying to promote herself, having realised the potential of her work. Nevertheless, she is not a typical farmer, but a pretty typical affluent Moscovite. Just way more talented than most."

That's why her story is ?????:badangel:
I think modern architectural training may involve quite a lot of computer training. Then one has a friends, side interest, additional, not listed education, extra course etc.

NikonNovice · Feb 11, 2014

I learned about DOF on a film camera, and I always think of it as light being the picture transmission medium. So letting more light in gives a faster transfer of the picture, and a shallow DOF. This being the most desired effect for lots of pictures. This is where bokeh comes into play. This means that the parts of the picture that are not in focus have a nice pattern, or are pleasing look at. I'm a novice, so I would be pleased if someone corrected me. When the lens is closed down, and less light is let through, it takes a long time to expose the picture, so the DOF is much greater.
When I think back to the film days, the DSLR is mind boggling in comparison. The film speed is electronic, and in most cases the current ISO settings have no relation to the ISO of film from years ago. It is almost like our cameras are limitless it abilities compared to the film days. We can now stretch a lens ability to make it do things that were impossible with film cameras.