| Joined: | Thu Apr 19th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
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So - going back to my horse portrait, it would have been better to focus on say the rider's toes than the horse's chest and to stop down the lens to f11 to straddle the horse with the available DOF.
Having said that, what lens focal length would optimise the background bokeh while giving the same DOF - bearing in mind I could get a bit closer to the subject?
What you need to know is the distance you were from the horse and the focal length needed to fully frame the horse and rider how you want it (bearing in mind you can crop later). I would say you need 3m dof for a horse head on. So it's a question of stopping down to get just 3m. It seems from the exif you were 8m away from the subject. You've cropped the feet a bit so let's say 10m would be better distance.
For example....
If you are 15m from the horse and have a 100mm lens you would need f3.5 to get 3m dof. But if you were only 10m away you would need to stop down to f8.
Of course dof is all about the zone of acceptable sharpness. It won't suddenly go totally blurred at 9.5m and 13.5m. So it's about making a judgement call as to whether you use larger apertures and let the horses bum go soft to ensure the background is out of focus. Failing that you ensure nothing in the background is close enough to matter...or mask and use a blur filter on the background in software.
Last edited on Wed Feb 13th, 2019 09:01 by Eric
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Eric