Hello I'm Graham and I hope everyone's having a great day and welcome to
today's video now this video is at the request
overview who is having trouble trying to achieve a nice blur background for
flower portraits so in this video I'm going to show you how to achieve that
using the camera that that person was using which is the FZ 1002 so this applies to the FZ 300/330 1000 and also the FZ 2000 2500 as well as they
both have the type 1 inch sensor now the first thing to consider with this
particular camera is the fact that the crop factor so that's the ratio of the
sensor in this camera its diagonal to that of a full-frame camera is 2.75 so
whatever aperture we set on this camera to get the amount of depth of field that
you would see on a 35-millimeter full-frame camera
you've got to multiply that aperture by 2.74 or 2.75 times so if you say three
stock so with an F 2.8 lens you're talking about f4 f5.6 f8 so you're
talking about the amount of depth of field but you would get natively with a
f8 setting on a 35-millimeter full-frame camera so you can see we already got an
amount of depth of field which is quite large if you're considering the F said
200 300 330 I've said a 282 with the 1/ 2.3 sensor that crop factor goes up to
5.6 so if you've got a 2.8 aperture you're talking about f11 f-16 so you've
got an amount of depth of field though which is very difficult to overcome and
try and catch some nice out of focus background unless you apply some of the
techniques that I'll be showing you in this video now if you consider the three
elements which create that amount of blur behind your subject
the first one is operative which we would just discuss which it's x two
point seven five times to give the equivalent aperture on full frame
cameras the second one is the lens focal length now if we've got a wide-angle
setting on the camera say 25 millimetres back
a deeper depth of field than would be if you were shooting at the telephoto
sighting of 400 millimeters so to achieve the amount of shallow depth of
field we require we've got to be using the longer focal length of the camera so
anywhere between 3 and 400 millimeters will give you a better chance of
achieving this amount of blur behind your subject and the other one is the
subject to camera distance now if you've got the subject close to your camera
then you will increase the amount of blur in your background especially if
you can keep the background far away from your subject if the background is
close to your subject now obviously it will be rendered with almost the same
focus as your subject itself so the rules are trying to keep your camera to
subject distance close and your subject to background distance as far as you
possibly can and I'll be demonstrating all those in this particular video so
with the camera set to the AF macro mode the closest focus distance you'll get
when you're on the telephoto setting is something like one meter and you measure
that from your subject to the center plane and with these particular cameras
if you consider the center of the mode dial to be your focal plane that gives
you a rough idea of the distance so it's not from the front face of the lens it
from the center of your mode dial to your subject has been that one meter
distance so try and keep the camera and the AF macro mode but but one meter away
from your subject and keep the subject from your background using that
telephoto setting of 400 millimeter lens and with an aperture between 4 and F 5.6
to hit the sweet spot for the lens we use an aperture of f/4 F 5.6 because
this is not a constant aperture lens as you zoom in to 400 millimeters you'll
find that you're using the F 4.5 setting anyway so f 4.5 F 5 point 6 will give
you a sweet spot for the camera and that's where you'll get the maximum
sharpness and there'll be enough depth of field there to give you some
front-to-back sharpness in your subject as well if you want to consider doing a
flower bloom so let me set up to take these pictures and show you the results
and how to achieve this type nice background blur with this particular
type of camera I'll set up the camera now so we got to film a bloom that I
want to photograph here of this lilac my cabinet of subject distance is about
one meter away I've got the camera set up on a tripod so I can maintain the
distance while we go through the procedures my aperture receptive f/4 has
us the minimum aperture with the camera set to 400 millimeters or a full
extension of the camera I'm using the AFS mode so that's the autofocus
single-shot so I've got the target set on the bloom that I want so I'm just set
the target on to the bloom that I want I've got the two second timer enabled so
that the camera doesn't vibrate when I press the shutter button so I'm going to
take that first shot for you and you can see that we've got a nice amount of blur
behind the subject the background is about three meters from this particular
subject now if I change the aperture from f/4 all the way up to f11 you'll
notice that the background becomes slightly sharper but it's still
acceptable how to focus so it's this distance this giving you the amount of
depth of field that we want in our picture ie the amount of blow in the
background so I don't say that picture f11 and you can actually see the amount
of subject blur behind my bloom so if you wanted the maximum amount of blur
you were using a sharp sure so I'm going to use f4 again and just don't sure that
I've got enough depth of field I'm going to go to F five point six so my aperture
set try for five point six it gives me a slightly deeper depth of field to ensure
that I've got a front to back sharpness of the bloom that I want to take so
let's take that picture in comparison if I went to a wide-angle setting so I take
this camera back down to the 25 millimeter tuition and I get as close as
I can to one of the blooms
so getting quite close I'll set the focus point on this point you notice
that even if I take the upper to down to F 2.8 the background appears to almost
in the same amount of focus as the subject itself so as that's
demonstrating the amount of depth of field you get with that wide-angle
setting so it's better to come back to that one meter and then use your longer
telephoto setting to throw your background out of focus well that's it
for the video will hopefully answered the questions for the viewer um if you
want to see more about this there'll be a write-up on my photographic blog I'll
put a link to that in the video description below also on the home page
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much for watching please do take care and I hope to see you all in the next
one good bye for now