Aperture

Aperture is the amount of light that is allowed into the lens, this is measured in F/Stops. F/Stops is what allows how much light can get into your picture. For example at a 2.8mm F/Stop it allows lots of light in and has a small depth of field while at a 22mm F/Stop it allows a minimal amount of light through and has a large depth of field as the lens becomes a pinhole shape.

Focal Length

The focal length of your lens is the optical distance (measured in mm) from the centre of the lens and its focus. This is what determines what you are able to see when you use your camera.

As you can see in this picture the lower mm focal point is able to capture the wide area of your picture while a high mm focal point is able to capture things much further away which helps if your subject is far away.

Depth Of Field

Depth Of Field is what is in focus in your image, If you have a Deep Depth Of Focus means that everything in the image will be in focus at a low aperture while if you have a Shallow Depth Of Field it means that only one item will be in focus at a high aperture. If you would like to get a better focus you will need a high F/Stop and if you’d like a less focused image you will need to use a low F/Stop.

We can see in this picture taken at f/2.8 that the main focus is more on the centre of the image as it has a shallow depth of field

We can see in this picture taken at f/8 that the focus is starting to focus on more than one item, getting closer to a deep depth of field.

We can see in this picture taken at f/22 that the focus is mostly focusing on everything giving us a deep depth of field in the picture.

The Work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (born in 1925 and died in 1976) worked as an optician for a living and pursued his passion for photography in the Lexington Camera Club. He was experimenting with many different strategies which included multiple exposures, motion blur and other various methods of photographic abstraction. Two of his series of photos are uniquely made using focus and depth of field, he used these features to make his images blurry to show the big potential of photography, film and cameras when looking at the world. His photos below:

As you can see the artist for one of his series of photos has used potentially a very low aperture to make his photos/subjects out of focused. And for his other series of photos he has used a higher aperture to have a sharp focus to show the large depth of field of his subject.

My Images

My images are inspired by Ralph Eugene Meatyard and I have tried to replicate both effects he has applied to his images.

What I like about these images is that it has the same style that Ralph Eugene Meatyard used and the images themselves have been taken and edited to try and replicate the effect of his work. What I can notice though is that some images contain too much in focus specifically in image two which I could definitely improve by finding a subject that contains less leaves or by using a much higher aperture. I also can notice that on the 2nd set of photos where the out of focus style was applied could also be better as in photo one it doesn’t seem as out of focused as the others compared to Ralph Eugene Meatyards. To improve this I could of made the photograph more out of focus by changing the manual focus dial to focus less on the subject.