Form Dof 1 2011: Fill & Download for Free

Lots of great advice here, especially on how to take saturated landscape shots and also advice on learning the factors of exposure (the number one most important thing you can do to start executing the shot you want, not being satisfied with the shot you got).But the way I'm reading the question is this: "What were the techniques or factors your learned that led to an immediate positive result in a big way?" Or, "What were your photographic "AHA!" moments?"I have a few of those, going back to high school. Some of these are really simple and obvious, but they are none the less part of my personal history with how I became the two-stops-above-mediocre photographer I am today:2001: Ilford B&W Film is totally where it's at. Color is for losers.2001: Holy crap, you mean under or over exposing a shot can be an artistic decision that might make the shot better? (Told you some of them were simple and obvious)2002: What's this rule of thirds business. OMG YOU'RE TOTALLY RIGHT! If I put that street lamp 1/3 into the frame instead of at the edge or 1/4 of the way... it looks better. Why? TELL ME WHY.2005: What's this long exposure business? Staying in the same place for half a second is hard. KABOOM THAT NIGHT SHOT IS RAD.2007: dSLRs are where it's at. Film is for losers.2007: Oh, so if I actually take the time to really focus on exposure composition, it will make my photos a hundred kabillion times better? (This is where I went from total crap to sub-mediocre)2007: These low f prime lenses let me totally kill these night shots without getting all noisy up in High ISO slop.2008: HDR, you're cool. (For like a minute)2009: White Balance, what do you mean? OH HOLY CRAP I CAN MAKE MORNING LIGHT LOOK WARM AND INVITING. I WANT TO WRAP THIS PICTURE AROUND ME LIKE A BLANKET.2010: I wonder if an FX sensor will make my night shots and dof better. I wondered right. PS- Prime lenses, let's see only each other. I really care about you and your f/1.4.2010: Spot metering, you're awesome. Now my quick-composed day shots don't look like watered down blue Gatorade.2011: Prime lenses, I really love you, and what we have is really special. But I just need to see a wide angle zoom right now. Don't worry, I'm not going to go back to that midrange zoom slut. I'll only use zoom on super wide and tele. I promise. I'll always need you though, for night shots and portraits and product photography. Really, you're still my favorite, I just need more.I tried to make these funny, but at the end of the day they're all totally serious. And if I had to really pull on three of these as most important, I'd go with:Learning to actually use and set White Balance (even though it's not rocket science, it really fixed all my color issues).Really learning how exposure works in practice, not just theory (this one is HUGE).Giving up crap zoom lenses for fast and versatile primes.The list will probably be different for you, but these three really opened doors to nailing the execution and composition of shots that I previously didn't know how to achieve. Eventually, you'll feel like you can get any shot you think you want, and those shallow DOF lowlight mystery pieces that your stud photo friend on Facebook posted won't be a composition mystery. When you can look at a good shot and make an assessment of how it was composed, exposed, and executed, then you're on the right track.Also, a great trick for this is the magazines and websites that post the photo equipment and image info for all of their shots. I used to feel like some shots in magazines were beyond my equipment... nonono... they were beyond my skill. If the magazine lists the camera and lens, and you have those, and you don't know how that shot was executed, time to start googling or asking around.That leads me to my most important technique that led me to become a better but still barely-two-stops-above-mediocre photographer:Don't be afraid to ask for help or advice from anyone who you think might be able to help you. And never be afraid to say "I don't know." I said that about the stupid AE-L button my D700 last night, and when I learned what it did I said "No wonder I never use it." And I programmed it to something useful. "I don't know" and "How did you do this..." are the two most important techniques you have. Use them. A lot.Edit a month later: I now use the AE-L button all the time. Go figure.

Your answer is pretty much in the question.Yes, for ages, we have had the control over depth of field on cameras. Well, on more serious cameras. Consumer cameras, back in the days of film often had very narrow apertures. It was common for cheap cameras to sport an f/8-f/11 lens set hypefocal to reach infinity and avoid the need for a focusing mechanism. Or aperture settings.I think for the rest of us, for a long time, out-of-focus vs. in-focus was a property of the lens, and sure, a creative option. But back in the old days, if you had a really good character to the out-of-focus portion of your image, that was… lucky.In modern times, we have developed the idea of bokeh — the quality of the out of focus details in an image. I think the average photographer was more aware of that being something a lens designer, with all the advantages of moden optical CAD, could think about. We don’t just get a fuzzy background, we get a very good-looking fuzzy background. But was it that big of a deal?Well, maybe. The artistic value of a shallow depth of field is subject isolation — I want my bee or butterfly or quarterback to stand out from the background. Add in the notion of bokeh and I guess I’m doing that, but also making the background pleasent, but without adding enough interest to attract attention away from the subject.I think some of it was popularize in professional, but even more, hobby/enthusiast photography. Yes, a fast lens can isolate your subject, but a nicer bokeh says “I spent more on that lens”. The fact I have that shallow DoF means that I used a really good camera, right?Some of it’s out of reach of many cameras. It’s all about the lens, not the camera or sensor, since after all, it’s an optical effect. This shot is a 220mm shot, but given the size of the camera sensor, it’s a pretty strong telephoto. On a full-frame camera, it’s a just-ok telephoto lens, and I probably would have scared away Mr. Anole.It’s also worth mentioning again that bokeh encompasses the quality of out of focus detail in an image. Sometimes it’s a little weird. Normally, some of these details are based on the shape of the camera aperture. So cheaper lenses have fewer aperture blades, for a less circular image. And some lenses have been designed with perfectly circular aperture via a rotating disc of holes, and others with diamond, heart, etc. shaped aperture openings. This shot is with a 500mm catadioptric lens (aka, cat or mirror lens), which delivers the odd donut bokeh you see here.So there’s that bit of trolling and other annoyances that are part of the Internet-driven modern era over literally anything. And for the record… most of these were shot with Micro Four Thirds cameras, one with an APS-C camera, and the last… that’s with a 1″-sensor Sony camera. The use of real DoF has, as you suggest, always been a creative tool available to photographers. But if it’s any kind of hullabaloo, maybe the ready availability of full-frame cameras and faster glass has pushed this into being kind of a fashion statement. It does seem that the only thing that matters to some online pundits is the ability to shoot one eye in focus but have the eyelashes out of focus (well, unless you’re using a Canon EOS R and the original firmware, which pretty consistently did the opposite with its eyeAF).And maybe part of this is the move to mirrorless cameras. You probably can’t asses focus very well on a DSLR. Most DSLR users aren’t sporting f/0.95 manual-focus lenses. The DSLR autofocus systems are super fast, but you have that back/front focus issue unless you calibrate your lenses. The AF sensors, at least until very recently, don’t have the ability to do anything like eyeAF, which mirrorless cameras have had for over half a decade. So there’s perhaps a bit more daring to use really shallow DoF… and yeah, that’s a thing people with cheap cameras can’t do.But to take on the rest of the question, for most of those 100 years, no one said “bokeh effect”. Because shallow DoF was just a consequence of using a long-enough lens at a wide-enough aperture and shooting close enough to your subject. It was just a matter of physics, until a bunch of computer nerds started trying to make tiny phone cameras look more like big cameras. That was the dawn of the bokeh effect. Because it had finally become a special effect.Early smartphones didn’t have variable focus at all. And they generally don’t have adjustable aperture, either (Samsung has a few that shoot at f/1.5 or f/2.4, mostly because their f/1.5 lens is kind of soft at full aperture, I think). So this is a control smartphone people never had. The phone would have an f/3.0 or so lens, probably around 3.0–3.5mnm focal length, set with its hyperfocal range extendeding just to infinity, close focus a foot or two.The first autofocus phones added AF at least as much to make the phone camera more useful as a tool… scanning barcodes, for example. You still don’t need much in the way of focus. You still don’t have a real aperture to adjust on nearly every phone.So they eventually decided to fake it, starting around 2016. This is one of the culprits. Phone photography had been getting important since around 2010–2011, and by 2015–2016, it was front and center. Huawei hooked up with Leica to help design a camera system for their P9 smartphone. This phone had two identical sensor chips, one in color, one B&W. And using the parallax between the two, it could depth-map a photo and basically use software to conjure up your choice of background blur — the user could literally dial in a virtual aperture setting.And while this tech kind of sucked back then, it was one of the early ideas of building in cameras for computational photography. Huawei still works with Leica, and they have held the top slot in cameras for 2–3 years at least. Eventually you figure it out.Anyway, this is when bokeh went from just being an aspect of physics to being “an effect”. And why is it a source of hullabaloo? I think several things. For one, now that tech-spec reading camera bloggers can get a full frame mirrorless camera for under $1,000 (with kit lens), there are ever more cases of measuing the size of one’s “camerahood” online.Next.. professional photographers are under constant attack in their markets against novice and amateur photographers. So it’s pretty likely that any pro working to keep being a pro is going to have their portfolio full of photos that you can’t get on a phone. So the shallow DoF thing is selling gear today. That means that camera companies don’t want that to end… ever.And phone shooters are mostly buying software when they upgrade to new hardware, maybe with a new AI processor to make it all possible. When you’re spending $1,000 every year or two on something as transient as a phone, you may want to defend that decision, too. And so phone shooters bust out their latest AIs and computational magic and measure their “camerahood” against DSLRs… because, of course, the DSLR isn’t even that interesting anymore. But smartphones are cameras for people who know very little about photography.These AIs are getting more sophisticated… but they have some work yet to do. Even the latest “bokeh effect” from Google and Apple are usually pretty easy to spot, versus a real optical bokeh. But the software guys are at least trying. They’re getting better about scaling the blur based on distance. They’re using some kind of optical model for the blur on the better implementations, rather than just a flat gaussian blur.Most of these special “fake bokeh” effects are tied to a “portrait mode”. That’s fundamentally because they’re designed to deliver those effects on portraits of people. When you have a more complex background, or objects other than people, they sometimes get it right, sometimes fail completely. Google, for example, has an AI to “cookie cutter” the human in the image, as well as the depth mapping they use based on analysis of the sensor’s autofocus data (and maybe in the Pixel 4, the second camera). When there’s no human, half of their software is useless, unless they’ve added a few other subject types to their deep learning cookie-cutter AI.The term “effect” is absolutely apropos for a smartphone.But not for a camera. When your phone can match this, let’s talk (not my photo, stock 85mm lens image from Canon).

As of Sept. 2011:Canon S95, G12S95 - Compact, fast lens, large sensor, full control, RAWG12 - Bigger, large sensor, full control, RAW, works with Canon flash systemNikon P7100Similar to G12, works with Nikon flash systemPanasonic LX-5Extra wide, fast lens. Otherwise similar to S95 but bigger.Olympus XZ-1Fastest lens on a P&S. Largest sensor too, for best DOF control. Full manual control, RAW, and surprisingly compact - smaller than G12/P7100.