White Balance, Depth of Field & Manual Focus
For my first assignment for Digital Imaging: Reset, taught by Eric Rosenthal, I experimented with my Canon s60's Av, Tv and M settings. I'd (sadly) never used these settings previously, and therefore had never experimented with using depth of field on a digital camera.
I set up an environment with unidirectional tungsten light (gooseneck lamp), and set my subjects (beautifully bizarre finger puppets my friend made) at approximately 1 inch and 2 feet from the lens, respectively. I took a few shots on auto, for comparison (see below for lousy results), then manually set the white balance using a grey card and began experimenting with the various settings, taking dozens of photos in each. I quickly realized, however, that I was not going to be able to get the depth of field results I wanted using the camera's auto-focus settings, so I went back and took a bunch of test shots with each setting at various manual focal distances (using no flash and the camera's 2-second delay to avoid blurring). I found it difficult to tell when I had the best focus on my camera's display, so for each arrangement of subjects, I did manual focus bracketing to ensure I got the shot I wanted.
I was pleased that I was able to achieve the effect I was aiming for, and even happier to learn that my camera has all these manual settings and is capable of focusing quite nicely on a subject within an inch of its lens, even without using it's (mysterious to me) macro setting. The final images below were captured at 1/25 shutter speed and 2.8 aperature:
Email me if you'd like to see the high-res version of any of these images.
Crappy Auto-Setting Photos for Comparison
With auto flash:
With flash disabled:
