Blurring the background is also a great way to make distracting backgrounds "disappear" or to focus on one particular thing.
The simple reason for this (and I have to be simple here because I so barely understand the technicalities of it all) has to do with light and the aperture setting in your camera. How blurry you can get it depends on the lens that is on your camera and how wide the aperture can go. The lower the number, the blurrier the background in your picture becomes.
The really cool thing about this setting is that you can set it to purposely focus on one thing and blur the rest of the photo.
Exhibit 1.
In the first photo, the lens is focused on Shane with the winning chess piece blurred in the foreground.
In the second photo, the lens is focused on the winning chess piece with Shane blurred in the background.
Exhibit 2.
See how I've focused the lens on the red rose in the foreground and blurred the other ones?
Flowers, stills, portraits and close ups are the best subjects for these types of pics. Here are two of my favorite ones.
In these, you can distinctly tell that the background is blurred and the flower is the focus.
The cool thing about the last two is that they were done with my point and shoot camera, which is what most people have. I think that Shane may have even taken them moving the setting to the right function after I explained it to him.
They were taken using the macro setting, which most point and shoots have these days. Look on your camera on the dial. There maybe a picture of a flower. That's the setting that you use to blurr backgrounds.
If you have a mountain on the dial, that's for landscapes and that's used to make things clear and in focus. That's better for further off shots.
In this pic, the aperture isn't set as wide and you can see the Fall leaves. I love this set of pics. They're my favorite of MM.
That's it for Professor Kim's Photography Lessons for today. I hope it gives some of you hope that if I can learn a camera, you can too. Take your camera out of automatic and start shooting. The worst thing you may have to do is to delete the unwanted pics. I'm spending a lot of time learning about my camera. I can't wait to go to the beach this year and take some photo shoots of the boys. Look for future pics. :)
6 comments:
she is very cute. Hard to believe something that cute could be so evil and naughty. she takes after her aunt or nanny I guess!
great pictures.... i am jealous!
Kim,
Did you take some photog classes or did you just learn this by yourself? You are very gifted.
To Miss Anonymous
I would not bite the hand that feeds you! You are talking about the two people that will keep your children for more than a few hours! Good thing we love the girls!
Thanks, Caroline and Robin. I love to take pictures. Mostly everything in our house is a photo that I've taken (blown up to a large size), artwork of the kids or my own stuff (other than photography). Ken asked me one day if I was planning on putting something else on the walls. LOL.
To answer your question, Robin, most of my photography is self taught. I have taken a few classes trying to understand the technical aspects of photography but really it's just playing around with the camera that is helping more than anything. Because I'm not good at technical stuff (to say the least!), I more understand it like "if I do this, this will happen" rather than some folks who measure out the light and calculate it out. I just know what looks good to me and go with that.
So, this is why I post things on photography to give others who are non-technical like me ideas about how they can improve their photography and I try to explain it in a easy to understand way. Because that's the way I learned it.
You may have a portrait setting on your point-and-shoot (it is usually a person's head). That is the setting that you can use to get a blurry background too (better than the macro setting for people). You just won't be able to focus on a specific object such as the chess pieces.
Take out your camera and give it a try. Have fun!
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