Quote Originally Posted by chelle View Post
Or are you actually saying that you can choose where in the image the focus is?
yep you sure can .. This part is where your different focusing techniques come into it and play a bit of a role in how the DOF in your picture will look.

When you choose a large aperture , and create a shallow DOF, the area of sharp focus in your frame will be shallower, front to back. Thats why the body of Dans colourful animal thingy is blurred.

The head is in focus because thats the part of the subject he has focused on. If hed focused the camera further back along the body, you would see the opposite, the body would be sharp and the head blurry. Make sense ??

Your camera has three different AF ( Autofocus ) modes. Spot, Continuous, Automatic.

You will mostly use spot focus for now and thats how you can produce something like Dan has here.

Set your camera to spot focus, select a large Aperture, look through your viewfinder and you will see a small red square in the middle of the viewfinder, place that square on the part in the scene that you want to be in sharp focus, half press the shutter button until you hear a beep, this beep indicates that the camera has AFed on that point, now reframe your shot to how you want the final picture to look whilst still half pressing the shutter button down, then shoot your picture. Your result should see your focal point nice and sharp and a nice degree of blurred surrounds.

Heres an example of how your DOF can look different in your pictures by altering the point of focus within the frame,
All 3 shots were taken in Av mode, with the same aperture each time of f1.4. I did this at f1.4 because this large aperture creates a very shallow DOF to make the differences more obvious to the eye

#1. The focus point was on the front lens in the foreground, as you can see the lens is sharp and everything else is blurred from about the middle to the rear of the frame.



#2. The focus point was the lens further back in the centre of the frame. This lens is now sharp and both the foreground and the background is blurred. The aperture used is exactly the same as the first shot, only the focus point has changed.



#3. This time the focus is on the rear lens. Now the foreground and middle of the frame is blurred and the rear lens is sharp and in focus.



All three shots were taken with the same large aperture of f1.4 , only the focus point has changed from shot to shot. This demonstrates how critical it is to get your focus spot on when playing with shallow DOF and when you might want a lot of blur in a particular part of your picture ...

and PS .. apologies for the horrible white balance .. it is midnight and i just cant be bothered