Depth of Field

Before PrairieJill and I did our poster grunge photowalk we visited an exhibit of photographs at the Cre8ery art gallery. The exhibit was called “Grass Matters” by Manitoba photographer Douglas Fast and it featured fascinating shots of different grasses, from many angles with interesting blurs. We speculated about how the photographer might have taken these photos and about the lens he might have used to get the sharp depth of field.

So, yesterday I decided to play with depth of field with my Nikon. Unfortunately it was late afternoon and there wasn’t much light….I was getting discouraged since the shots kept looking almost solid black in the viewfinder. So I gave up….

But today I loaded the photos onto the computer and opened up the raw images. I was blown away by the effects. I don’t even mind the graininess resulting from the low light…

Original achillea image:

Raw image auto adjusted:

Even a partially brightened image is pretty cool:

Then of course I had to play with HDR:

I cropped the image a bit…so the flower wouldn’t be dead center:

Not sure if the straight leaf at the bottom is a distraction….

One last photo…of spruce needles taken at the same time, but in the yard where there was a bit more light:

Way cool….

Hmmm. Who would have imagined that I would abandon the android photo apps for a while and go back to the Nikon!!!