Photography question

[Steve Bullman]

I have an SLR camera but dont know how to use it(complete overkill and waste if im honest).....but i need to take a close up image of something and want to have everything in the background slightly blurred. I see this sort of photo often and wondered what the settings might be on the camera to acheive this sort of effect?

[SamG]

set it to 'Macro' mode, it will be a small picture of a flower on the settings wheel, this is the setting for taking close up photos on most cameras

[Dean Lofthouse]

I have an SLR camera but dont know how to use it

 

Me too

 

We should start a club

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone cos it was

[Steve Bullman]

Thanks Sam, i'll give that a try

[RobRainford]

Steve there is an app called SLR cameras for dummies on the app store. Very simple to understand and helped me learn how to get a better grip of the camera.

 

Macro shots depend on the lens, what lens do you have? There is a little flower icon on the lens which then has a distance next to it, my 18-55mm lens has the symbol and 0.25m next to it. That means that the closest you can get for a macro shot is 0.25m otherwise you can't focus on it. To get a better shot I use manual focus as auto picks the closest bit so is tricky. Manual means you can get a more rounded focus of the whole subject.

[Steve Bullman]

im not going to be doing mega close ups. its a sony camera with the standard lens, i'll have to check

[wisewood]

If you have photoshop you can always create a soft blur around the object in focus. There's lots of 'walk throughs' to help you, just do a google search.

[Tom Joye]

Steve,

In 'photography slang', you need a large diaphragm opening to get the kind of pictures you want.

 

Don't know how you have to do that on your camera (try reading the manual ), but it is written down as an f with a number (f4 --> f22). the higher the number, the larger the diaphragm opening.

 

Good luck!

Tom

[mattplace]

You need to "narrow the depth of field".

Eg. If you stand 1m away from an object and take your pic with you lens zoomed-out, the object and the surrounding area will be in focus.

If you then stand as far away as possible with your lens zoomed-in so the object appears to be the same size as pic1, you have "narrowed the depth of field" and the background will be blurred. You may need to switch your camera to manual focus to be able to focus on your subject.

 

To get the best effects, you need a large aperture lens (expensive!) with a low F number. Eg. F1.4 etc.

 

I'll post up some examples if you like??

[geoff]

Bang it in aperture priority,& adjust the f.stop number (aperture,like the pupil in your eye), to the lowest number,say F3.3 or F4,and take your picture,the lower the F number the wider the aperture/the shorter the depth of field in focus.

Edited November 7, 2011 by geoff
hit the send button by accident!