Exercise Two - Focus with a set aperture

For this exercise find a scene which has depth - a wood full of trees, for example, a row of cars seen from an acute angle, or a crowded market. From the same place, take two or three pictures, each focused on something at a different distance. (For this to work, the lens aperture must be wide - at its lowest f-stop number.)


For this exercise a number of images were taken of a glass chess set.


All three images were taken with a 50mm lens with the aperture set at f1.8 for all images, with the Autofocus Point (AF Point) set to the centre to ensure that camera focused on a particular section of the image .

The first of these images has focused on the chess piece furthest form the camera. With the aperture fully open, in this case f1.8, the chess pieces closest to the camera are not sharp.

In the second image, focus was set on the chess pieces in the centre of the picture, now only those pieces in the centre are sharp, those pieces closest and furthest from the camera our out of focus

The final shot in this set, focuses on the pieces closest to the camera, as such those pieces that further from the camera become increasingly out of focus.

Of the three, my personal preference is on the first of these, the sharp image of the furthest chess piece against the slightly blurred background, leads the viewers eye from the blurred images in the front of the image to the sharper images back of the picture, giving the viewer more experience as they explore the image as their eye moves from front to back.