Photography challenge: focusing on still life

While last month I was playing around with DSLR to find out what it can do, this month I decided to focus more on focus …basically trying to achieve focus in my pictures where I want it and in what depth I want it (not letting camera to decide for me automatically). This is why I thought practicing on still life photography would be a great way to learn this!

Last month I mentioned that I did try to find out what are the f-stops on the camera setting. Well, now I know! Those numbers represent the depth of field in the camera! The larger the number the bigger the depth. Because I wanted to learn to focus on specific areas in the picture I decided to go with the lowest f-stop (3.5f on the camera I used).

Now to focus on the specific object I learned that either you can point the camera lens centre at the object you want to (like the picture bellow) or……change the focus point on the camera settings (I am sure if you look at your camera manual you will find this term used somewhere). In the picture bellow I set the focus on the top of the frame. The camera instantly selected the background and you can see it is most focused dimension in this picture. Anything in front of the background is less focused!    I changed the focus point in my camera back to the centre and here you can see it focused on the brown leaves leaving anything behind (background) or in front in blur. In the picture bellow I used the same settings and focused on the same leaves, but because I placed the leaves arrangement further away from the background it made it (the background) even more blur. I hope you find this helpful ;-)

Rasa xoxo