I Can See It!!

I wanted to photograph this beootiful tomato that was given to us. It was grown in a greenhouse. Can't wait to see how it tastes! We're waiting for it to ripen. Anyway, I decided to go from one extreme to another with my F-stop (aperture - opening in the camera) and adjust my shutter speed to what my camera said is correct and see what happened. I was trying to get a blurred background (shallow depth of field) and I finally did it manually. I can see it! This top shot was as far as I could go with the smallest F-stop - F27. You see, an F stop is a fraction so it's actually 1/27th. My camera showed a correct exposure to be 1.5 seconds for the shutter speed. As you can see, it is "clear as a bell" from front to back, everything is in focus.

So I went the other way as far as I could go and used an F4 with a shutter speed of 1/30 and the background is blurred, a shallow depth of field. I like both photographs but I preferred the background to be blurred, as in the bottom photo, so the tomato would be the star!

A Bubble Bath

As I'm trying to keep my commitment of posting a photo every day in 2009 AND I was told I had strep yesterday, I decided to take my photos in the bathtub! Isn't THAT unique?!? ha! I had been lying around studying how to manually operate my camera and I finally figured out how to operate and set the aperture and F-stop manually and how the camera shows the combination as a correct exposure. I had never figured this out before. At first I played around shooting every correct combination of the two at 400 ISO lying in bed last night. I also was reading about depth of field so decided that in the tub, I would go from one extreme to another. I started with the "blue" photos above. No, folks, these are NOT photos using a filter! This ended up being more of a lesson in white balance than anything else.

In both sets of photos, the ISO is set at 400, no flash and the top photo of the blue set has settings of F-22 and 0.3 seconds, the bottom with F-3.5 and 1/90 seconds - extremes in the F-stop for 18mm lens. In the bottom (more true to color set), the top photo is set at F3.5 and 1/90 seconds and the bottom photo is F-22 and 0.3 seconds. On my camera, both of these settings were shown to be correct, not over or under exposed. I cannot see any difference in the depth of field but boy, oh, boy was there a difference in the white balance! This tub is right under a window with no curtain where a north/northeastern light comes in. I did not have a light on because it was mid-afternoon. After I took the "blue" pics, reviewed them and saw that they were blue, I investigated my white balance and it was set for tungsten light. So I first adjusted it to daylight, then noticed I had daylight but cloudy day and set it to cloudy day (because it was a cloudy day) and look at the difference!

But I kind of like the blue effect. It's soothing, goes with a bubble bath and artsy. What do you think?

NOTE: Do you see any difference in the Depth of Field (the crispness and clearness of focus from just below my knee to the tip of my toes and beyond to the wall, door, etc.)?
SECOND NOTE: I did use my automatic focus. (These "old" eyes, you know!)