Depth of field

I thought you might be interested in looking at how changing the aperture can affect depth of field. These two photographs were taken using my Olympus Pen micro four thirds camera with a 50mm macro prime lens.

For the first photograph I used the lens wide open at f2 and as you can see the background has hardly any detail at all emphasising the conker case. You might also be able to see that not all of the case is in focus just the area around the right hand spike. This is obviously the downside to using such a large aperture at such close range.

The second photograph was taken at f5.6 three stops smaller and you can see the marked difference on the background and on the conker itself with much more being in acceptable focus. I could have tried an even smaller aperture but the shutter speed was already down to 1/30 and as I was hand holding the camera I would probably have suffered from camera shake but the photos illustrate the difference you can create in a photo just by choosing a different aperture.

If you would like to learn more about this and other aspects of controlling the result in your photos have a look here - http://www.drphotography.biz/workshops/index.html