Psuedo Depth of Field
 

I'm sure this is nothing new to most, but I had a very productive weekend and am excited about the results, so I had to post it somewhere.

I was getting a bit tired of the deep focus on my camera and have been wanting some very shallow depth of field lately, and no matter what I do with the camera's settings I have not been able to achieve the results that I wanted.

So I redesigned my set for each shot with the characters and props set at extreme distances from one another and moved my camera back another 25-30 feet than normal. I then lit the subject I was focusing on and zoomed in and was able to create some remarkably shallow depth of field and some wicked rack focuses. I've done this in the past but it just worked far better than usual this weekend.

Again, just excited and thought I'd reccommend this method to those who cannot obtain a 35mm adapter and have some versatility with their environments.

Hi Nice to see someone from Las Vegas... can you post some photos of your results?

Excellent! - Yes this is the way I do it. When you say lit - how much light?

What I do is to open the iris WIDE then knock back the exposure with NDs on the front of the camera. I can achieve - including my in-built ND - 2.4 of ND. Plenty dark! Shooting outside on fairly sunny days I can achieve more than decent shallow DoF. The other way to knock back the exposure is to reduce the shutter speed from 1/50 towards 1/100 and experiment.

It is the combination keeping the iris wide and zooming in from a relatively further longer view, that is the clue.

Grazie

Yes this is a common method for getting a better depth feeling. The only problem is that when you zoom in, both the subject and the background get magnified, therefore the relative size depth cue is lost.

But when you have the space this is usually better than having a flat shot. :)

Yes that right, zooming in so much gives you a very flat shot, no depth.