Focus with a set aperture

Exercise:- Focus with a set aperture  (2-3 photographs)

This project is all about Depth of Field (DoF), getting to know the camera and how aperture settings can affect the look and feel of the final image. To demonstrate this I fitted my camera to a tripod so that the frame would remain the same for all the images, but the point of focus would differ in each of the three images, foreground, middle and background.

I took the following images on a windy day on Dartmoor, all of the images were taken with the camera set on Aperture Priority (A) mode and at an aperture of f2.8

I chose a granite Tor where three outcrops of rock were visible from an acute angle.

Image 1 

In image 1, I focused on the rock in the foreground, as you can see from the image the eye is immediately drawn to it, and the rocks in the background are out of focus, even though they are still clearly visible.

Image 2

In the second image, I focused on the rock in the centre of the frame. Even though the rock in the foreground is larger in the image than that of the middle one, the middle one draws the eye to it as it's in focus. 

Image 3 

In the final image, I focused on the rock in the background. The rock in the foreground is now well out of focus and the middle one slightly out of focus. Again as before because the rock in the background is in focus the eye is drawn to it, not as pronounced as before, but still drawing the eye towards it. 

These images clearly show that the area of focus draws the eye to different areas of the image depending on where the focus point is, thus drawing the attention of the viewer to it. This principle can be often seen in portrait images where the photographer has focused on the model, in particular the eyes and has thrown the background out of focus to draw the viewers attention to the model. 

Of the three images, I prefer image 1, as the focus point is in the foreground of the image, the eye and therefore the viewer is drawn to it and then moves back to scan the other parts of the image. The image shows clearly the texture to the granite and the image has depth and in my opinion will spend longer looking at it that the other two images.