Exercise 2: Focus with a set aperture.

The aim of this exercise is to ascertain how the object of focus draws the attention and how to make a subject stand out from its surroundings.

In order to illustrate this I had to find a scene with depth. I chose the acute angle of a garden gate from a focal length of 55mm. Then as instructed I set the camera to its widest aperture of f5.6. I used the histogram to guide my choice of exposure which was 1/125 sec. It was quite a bright day so I had the ISO at 100. As I'm not greatly confident in the accuity of my own vision I usually use auto-focus but this exercise required me to manually focus on three different parts of the scene so I had to use manual focus. The resulting photographs are below.













The exercise asks me to identify which image I prefer and why.
Although it's probably the poorest quality photograph in terms of both artistic and technical merit I prefer the first image because for me it demonstrates the effect of focus and aperture on depth of field most clearly.

Reflection on Exercise 2.Focus with a set aperture.

Although I was familiar with the concept of depth of field I hadn't realised that it could be controlled so effectively by focus and aperture. I previously thought that it was achieved by focal length. Now I know that (assuming that focal length and object distance remain the same) depth of field decreases as aperture increases, and increases as aperture decreases. I thought that aperture was only concerned with the amount of light reaching the camera sensor. I am still not sure why aperture affects focus and depth of field but the next exercise may clarify things for me so I will continue with it before I decide whether I need to find out more. In the past I have had difficulty in achieving sharpness in specific areas so hopefully this new knowledge will be useful in addressing that issue.