Friday 20 January 2012

Exercise - Focus with a set aperture

Subject:  CDJ decks and mixer


It is cold, dark and wet outside (typical Manchester weather) so I chose to shoot something inside that has some depth and interesting detail.  I decided to use a fast lens at maximum aperture to produce a short depth of field and exaggerate the different areas of focus.  The 'AMERICAN' text in the foregroup and the yellow and red lights towards the back of the image should act of points of interest to draw the eye towards different parts of the subject.



50mm lens, f1.8 in Aperture Priority mode, tripod
The red area indicates where I focused the image for each shot.  I would say there is roughly 1/3 of the image in focus in each shot.  


In the first image the eye is immediately drawn towards the writing in the foreground, with the top third of the image being completely out of focus, resulting in some nice blurring to the coloured lights in the top right hand corner of the image.


In the second image I have focused on the centre of the jog wheel, roughly in the middle of the image.  Consequently there is some nice detail in this middle part of the image, with the foreground and background both slightly out of focus, more so in the background.


The third image was focused on the top right corner where the coloured lights are.  The eye is immediately drawn to this area of the image where there is some good detail.  However, the pleasing colours from the out of focus lights have now been lost, and the writing in the foreground is now unreadable.  This is definitely my least preferred of the three.


I would say my favourite image is the first image where the focus is on the foreground writing.  This takes your attention initially but there is also the out of focus lights in the background to draw your eye through the image.

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