In the first assignment we looked at using a small aperture to get a deep depth of field (objects different distances from the lens are all in clearer focus).  The topic of the second assignment is the exact opposite – using a large, wide open aperture to get a shallow depth of field.  The apertures we are talking about here is on the order of f/1.4, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, or somewhere in that range.  The smallest f/number available to you depends on the lens you are using.  The fastest lens I have right now is f/1.8 on my 50 mm prime.  The smallest f/number available for a particular lens is often referred to as its speed.

For a lot of people (i.e. at least for me) this large aperture (small number) is a lot easier to use than the deep depth of field obtained using a small aperture.  The reason is that when your aperture is wide (or close to wide) open there is a lot of light getting into the camera (remember, when you double the f/number you halve the amount of light getting in and therefore you must halve the shutter speed or double the ISO).  When a lot of light is getting in you can use a faster shutter speed and therefore can hand-hold more often in lower light conditions.  This is a practical reason for using a smaller aperture and is why many sports photographer use the huge and very expensive lenses, especially at night games.  The large aperture allows them to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action, even in less than ideal lighting.  Another reason to use a large aperture is to take advantage of the associated shallow depth of field for creative purposes.  The shallow depth of field allows you to single out your subject from other objects that are nearer to your lens or further away.

If you have been reading my posts for a while or have already looked at my discussion of the first assignment you know that I love the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson.  This is an absolute must read for anyone just starting out in photography.  In the book Bryan calls these large apertures singular-theme apertures or isolation apertures.  He addresses the topic from a creative standpoint as opposed to the practical low light applications.  When you intentionally blur almost everything in the photo aside from your subject the viewers eye is almost instantly drawn to the intended subject.  It can make the subject really standout even if there are a lot of distractions in the background or foreground.  If you don’t have the book it is also covered extensively online, i.e. at the digital photography school.  If you do have the book one of my favourite examples in it is on p.29, the one of the closed sunflower.

This technique is useful for things like portraits where the person or people may otherwise be lost in a busy background.  This is contrary to the first assignment where you want to show the environment around the person.   Depending on the background you may only want to blur it slightly so it is still recognizable (maybe use f/5.6) or maybe blur it until it just becomes a soft almost unrecognizable blob of colour using f/1.4, f/1.8 or the widest aperture available on your lens.

Isolating your subject in the midst of objects in the foreground is also a useful and sometimes very pleasing technique.  You can frame your main subject with blurry foreground objects.  An example is this shot I posted alittle while ago with some other ultimate frisbee shots.

I was shooting wide in interests of fast shutter speeds to freeze the action, but this also works from a creative viewpoint.  I like how the cutter and defender frame the handler, but are blurry enough to not distract from the main subject.

One thing to consider is that the margin of error for getting your focus right is smaller with a wide open aperture.  When you have a deep depth of field you can get your focus distance not quite right for your main subject not quite rite (say the eyes of the person in a portrait) and you won’t notice, but when using a shallow depth of field a small error in focusing may make the main subject blurry compared to some other object in the frame.  The viewers eye will be drawn to what is in focus, even if it is not the main subject.

I will revisit some of my older photos to try and find a few good examples, but I will also start a new assignment.  My main lens, the 18-200 mm has a varying widest aperture of f/3.5-5.6 depending on the zoom level.  I may use that for some, but to get some seriously shallow depth of field my 50 mm prime has a largest aperture of f/1.8.

The Assignment:

I am going to try to take some pictures using large apertures (small f/numbers) when it makes creative sense to do so.  This doesn’t mean just using it in low light in order to get a faster shutter speed, but using it when it is the creatively correct aperture to use in order to isolate the main subject from its surroundings.

I don’t have a time frame for this and I will continue to work on assignment 1 as well.  I will post some results as they come in and maybe even compare some similar photos with contrasting aperture settings.

Click here to see all of the assignments.

Click here for the results so far for this assignment

I saw this general picture from my car one night on the way home from ultimate and went back a few days later to get it.  I don`t think I captured it perfectly and I will try to get it again in the future.

This shot was taken handheld (I need a new tripod) at f/22, 1/60 sec., ISO 800.  The tree is located at the Ottawa experimental farm and I wanted to have a deep depth of field to capture the corn in the foreground (to give an idea of the location) the tree (the main subject) and the sun/horizon in the background all in focus.  The small aperture allows for this.

I did some post processing on this to get it to where I thought it was presentable.  In Camera Raw I applied a graduated ND filter over the sky so I could lighten the corn in the foreground without blowing out the sky and losing the silhouetted tree.  I also didn’t really like how close the crop was to the top (I don’t really like the crop on the right side either, but that is much harder to fix) so I extended the canvase and used content aware fill to extend the sky upwards.  This also moved the horizon line down from almost the middle, closer to the 1/3 line.   This is a subject I would like to revisit some time.  The corn is more mature now, and maybe I can find a more interesting sky (cool clouds or something).

I am going to move on to the next assignment soon.  I will continue to look for good opportunities to use a small aperture to tell a story with objects at different distances from the focal plane.  If I get good ones I will post them in this category.   I by no means think I have perfected the technique but it is now something I look for when composing my photos.  The next assignment will look at how to use a wide open aperture to single out subjects and separate them from their environment.

Jessie’s Ultimate Frisbee team, Stella, was playing in the 2010 Ontario Women’s Regionals here in Ottawa on the weekend and I went out to take some pictures.  ’Some’ turned into almost two full 4 gig cards.  I filtered it down to 230 and posted them to the Stella site.  Here are a few of my favourites, though there are some other good ones.  I posted so many to the Stella site so that I have most, if not all of the players covered at least a couple times, ‘cuz who doesn’t love looking through pictures from an activity and finding a few of themselves.

Taking pictures of the huddle is tough.  I got some decent ones when they all move close together for the cheer.  I like this one because it gives some context to the day, and I can picture it being a two page spread in a magazine with title and text in the negative space.

I found that because I am often so far away from the action, even my 200mm lens doesn’t get in close enough so I had to do quite a bit of cropping.  For this set I cropped them all to the same aspect ratio (some landscape and some portrait), just for consistency (and the landscapes fit nicely as wallpapers on new widescreens).   Sometimes it wasn’t the optimal crop, but cropping in close makes for much more dramatic pictures and removes some distracting elements both on the field and in the background.

Wasn’t Jessie’s hand block awesome!  I’m glad I caught it on film.  One problem I have had is maintaining focus as the conditions around my main subject change (like people running through the scene as I am focusing on the handler and marker).  When I knew where action was going to occur I would auto focus and then hold the focus lock (nicely positioned for my right thumb beside the eyepiece) so that the auto tracking feature would not try to change the focus as other people moved.  This lead to some cool shots of the handler framed by cutters in the foreground, such as the one below.  Sometimes I did forget to let go of the lock button.  Practice.

You may have noticed that I put a small watermark on this set.  This pictures get passed around and Facebooked quite a bit, so I thought I might as well put my name on them.  I don’t really care at this point if they get used elsewhere and the resolution isn’t the greatest anyways.  I currently do these games for fun and practice, but I do like that people know where they came from.  I will work on a better watermark (I have an idea) and I will discuss how I make them and batch apply them in a future post.  It isn’t as easy as it should be with Photoshop.  I know third party software exists, but I am surprised Adobe hasn’t made it easier.

The last one is another of my favourites, though it has some flaws I will try to remedy in the future (such as the cutting off of some feet and legs).  I still think it’s a cool shot and would also make a neat two page spread, or a good wallpaper since there is some negative space to put some icons.  I may do that.

Again, all of the Pictures are posted on the Stella Site.

While at the F1 race in Montreal I had a good view of the Biodome, one of the buildings constructed for Expo ’67.  I took several pictures of it, but none seemed to really pop.  After looking at it and trying to make it work in Camera Raw, I thought it may be a good time to try adding some texture.  I’d never done it before, but I think the result is interesting.

The original was taken in the middle of a sunny day and seems somewhat flat and washed out.  In Camera Raw I converted to grayscale and played around with the grayscale mix sliders.  Darkening the blues makes the sky darker and gives the image a little more tension since the sky contrasts the trusses in the geodesic dome.  In the basic sliders of Camera Raw I set the blacks really high and upped the clarity slider.  This further increased the contrast and also made the lone cloud stand out a little bit more.

Better than the original, and not bad on its own, but I somehow got it in my head that it should have a grainy-grungy look to it.  I tried the add grain feature of the new Camera Raw, but I wasn’t thrilled with the results, so I figured I should try adding some texture.

I didn’t really want to buy a big pack of textures since this is my first attempt at it so I googled (it’s a verb, no point in fighting it) for a while and came across bittbox.com who seems to regularly post freebies, including some sets of free textures on most Tuesdays.   I looked through a bunch of the freebies and found this one

in his Grunge Frames set.  I converted it to grayscale (because I wanted my end result to be black and white) and opened it in Photoshop.  I copied the entire image and pasted it on top of the Biodome picture.  Ctrl-T allows you to transform the frame and I stretched it to the size of the original picture.  In the drop down menu at the top left of the Layers window I set the blending mode to overlay and dropped the opacity of the layer to 31%.  This was just trial and error until I got it to what I think looks good.

I was going to stop there, but I still didn’t feel that it was done.  I liked the subtle scratch marks just to the right of the cloud and wanted to add more of that.  I hunted through more of the freebie textures and came across this

from bittbox’s ice textures.  I again converted to grayscale and flipped it along the vertical axis so that the vertical scratches would be above the Biodome, just right of the cloud.  I pasted this as a new layer over the picture, transformed it to fit, set the blending to overlay and dropped the opacity way down to 11%.  I sort of liked what was going on, but the scratchy look wasn’t quite right so I went into the curves of just the one layer and adjusted the curve to up the contrast and make the darker parts of the layer stand out.

I like the end result.  I think it adds some tension to a somewhat bland picture.

I’m not sure if I will use textures too often, but it seems like a good tool to have to add some punch to an otherwise boring picture.  One of the biggest challenges here was finding the right texture to emphasize the picture.  I think it worked out here, but it’s hard to know what you’re really looking for and where to find it.