 Kelly R. Theobald |
Depth of Field: Getting a Blurred Background My husband bought be a Nikon D70 for Christmas, and I'm wanting to start doing portraits. I've shot a few, and I want my background to be a little out of focus but can't seem to make it happen. I've tried to adjust my F/stop but still can't get it slightly out of focus. I've got a 18-70mm lens and 28-80 but can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Any advice would be great. Thank you.
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Kerry L. Walker |
The depth of field decreases as the size of the aperture increases. Also, the closer you are to the subject and the further away from the background the subject is, the more the background will be blurred.
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Michael H. Cothran |
1. Use as wide an aperture as you can. 2. Keep your subject as close to the camera, and as far from the background, as you can. 3. The shorter the focal length, the more difficult it is to blur your background. The long end of your two zooms is the shortest you would probably ever want to use. Using a lens in the 100-200mm range at a large aperture, and standing back further would do the most to increase your background blur. Michael H. Cothran www.mhcphoto.net
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Kelly R. Theobald |
Thank you for the advice. I'll try what you have recommended. I do have a 70-300 lens that I'll try to use instead and see what happens. Thanks again.
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Gregg |
Keep in mnd that on lke film cameras, digital is ultra sharp and has little depth of field. I would be curous as to the smallest f-stop your lens have. A f 4.5 or lower would give you the results you may be looking for. Otherwise in photoshop you can create the same effect. Before croppng, make a duplcate layer, apply gaussian blur, and then use the eraser tool to bring the subject back to sharp focus. Flatten the image and then crop. Good Luck
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Andrew Laverghetta |
Her D70 should create the same depth of field as any other SLR out there shouldn't it? Usually film is sharper than digital though, the image is at least, unless you're using a medium format digital back of the new Canon 1Ds Mark II...
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