Photography: How to give an aura of mystery to pictures

When you take a photograph, the objects lying within thefocal length of the lens is sharper in contrast to those either further awayfrom the lens or closer to the camera . The range between the sharpest nearestand farthest points is called "depth of field". You can creatively use depth offield in photography. Knowledge of depth of field can make your picturesinteresting. For instance, by putting your subject in sharp focus, whilesimultaneously ensuring the background is out of focus, you will create a picturewhose subject is not cluttered by the background.

 

Focus plays a significant part in how good a picture is. Byusing depth of field, you can play around with the areas in a photograph thatyou want to draw attention to. With creative use of defocus, you can add anaura of mystery to a picture (much like in a soft-focus photograph) or capturea glorious landscape without parts of it being blurry.

The magic of how to control depth of field lies in yourability to use the aperture of the camera. The simple rule is that opening upthe aperture decreases the depth of field, making it smaller produces theopposite effect. A smaller aperture, say f11, will give you sharpness over agreater area of the picture than say f4 over the same focal length.

Depth of field can also be increased or decreased by usingdifferent focal lengths. Depth of field increases when we use wide-angle lensesand it decreases when we use longer focal length lenses, a 200mm lens forexample.

However, remember that it isn't simply a matter ofincreasing or decreasing the aperture. Simply changing the f number can giveyou over or under exposed photos. The aperture and the shutter speed have aninverse relationship in continuous light, that is, the bigger the aperture, thefaster should be the shutter speed and vice-versa. Suppose you have set yourcorrect exposure for a shot to f16 aperture and 1/125 shutter speed. You thenrealise that you need to step down the aperture to f2.8 because you want onlythe subject in focus. This means that you will open up the aperture by fivefull stops from f16 (11-8-5.6-4-2.8). For the exposure to remain correct, youwill correspondingly have to increase the shutter speed by five full stops from1/125: 1/250-1/500-1/1000-1/2000-1/4000. At an aperture of f2.8 you willrequire a shutter speed of 1/4000 to maintain the original exposure.

When using flash, you will have to control the exposure byincreasing or decreasing the light intensity or moving the light source away orcloser to the object.

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