High Tide Aquatics

Blurry background

I can only focus front or background. Why can't I focus both? Can you guys please help me out?

Here is a sample pic. :-[ .. I only resized the image and put it in a frame. Nothing else was adjusted.

Jesse.jpg
 
I thought it would always be like this, kind of like your eye. If you focus on something near, far will be blurry and vice versa. I am by no means a photographer, thats just my understanding
 
I'm still learning all this stuff myself, but as I understand it, whether the background is blurry or not is determined by your depth of field. The larger the apeture, the shallower the DOF is, and vice versa. You can get everything more in focus by increasing your DOF.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm
 
Background blur depends on a lot of things: lens used, perspective as seen through lens, subject to background distance, aperture, etc. Looking at the picture and the surroundings, you could probably stop down and gotten more of the background into focus.
 
[quote author=Natterjak link=topic=3131.msg34247#msg34247 date=1203397784]
I'm still learning all this stuff myself, but as I understand it, whether the background is blurry or not is determined by your depth of field. The larger the apeture, the shallower the DOF is, and vice versa. You can get everything more in focus by increasing your DOF.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm
[/quote]

Thanks Bonnie!! I will read the link..
 
Stop down basically refers to aperture. If you're shooting at f/2.8, stopping down means any smaller aperture, such as f/4 or f/5.6. You see it more often w/outdoor nature and macro photography, when they want a lot of depth of field. Most of the time, they don't even start until f/8 and they're often hugging the f/16 or f/22 (some guys stick to f/11 since that's when distortion shows up on the sensor).

I can't see the EXIF data on the shot since it was stripped, but my guess is that you had some pretty crazy shutter speed that you could have given up on and stopped down for more depth (i.e. instead of shooting at f/5.6 with a shutter speed of 1/500, you could have gone with f/11 with a shutter speed of 1/125).

Also forgot to add that lenses come into play also. The amount of aperture blades and so on changes the look of the bokeh.
 
I haven't play with the aperture setting.. That thing is confusing :p .. I will try to play with it this weekend. I'm going back there in couple week. Hopefully I can get better picture this time.

btw, I use the Nikon 18-200 len. I just bought a 4GB cards and a SB-600. Tripod next and then a macro len. ;D
 
Now I don't know much about cameras, however I do know a bit about optics, and if the background is "far" away from the foreground, you can't focus in on both. Has to do where the light focuses, it's a different spot for far objects than it is for near, as a result a single lens can't focus on both of those simultanously.

However, if you take two pictures in rapid succession one that focuses far and one that focuses near, you could photoshop the good pieces together :D
 
[quote author=sfsuphysics link=topic=3131.msg34292#msg34292 date=1203432729]
......

However, if you take two pictures in rapid succession one that focuses far and one that focuses near, you could photoshop the good pieces together :D

[/quote]

Yeah but you have to be really good with photoshop to do that and I'm suck ::) :p ..
 
also look into hyperfocal focusing.
http://www.google.com/search?q=hyperfocal+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:eek:fficial&client=firefox-a

It usually has to do with your lens, sometimes they have an infinity sign on them for your aperture ring. I've never played with it too much, but hyperfocal focusing is basically getting everything in focus.


Lately I love shallow DOF:

2276292135_3942109b52.jpg
 
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