Exercise: Faking DoF
While doing macro work, it's often hard to isolate your subject from its surroundings. I find these little grasshoppers to be especially hard subjects, because they are so "jumpy" :-) I usually end up scaring them away, or barely manage to shoot them in awkward positions... You can't do much to isolate them in a situation like this. If you open the aperture, then your depth of field (DoF) gets really shallow and you don't get much detail on the insect itself. If you close the aperture you end up with very "busy" surroundings, like in this case (see the original photo below). When working with grasshoppers, you don't get to try that many different apertures before they jump away, anyway... They are such impatient models :-P
This is my first attempt at isolating the subject by faking the DoF in Photoshop, using layer masks and Gaussian blur. Compare it with the original below and tell me what you think.
Exercise: Faking DoF
While doing macro work, it's often hard to isolate your subject from its surroundings. I find these little grasshoppers to be especially hard subjects, because they are so "jumpy" :-) I usually end up scaring them away, or barely manage to shoot them in awkward positions... You can't do much to isolate them in a situation like this. If you open the aperture, then your depth of field (DoF) gets really shallow and you don't get much detail on the insect itself. If you close the aperture you end up with very "busy" surroundings, like in this case (see the original photo below). When working with grasshoppers, you don't get to try that many different apertures before they jump away, anyway... They are such impatient models :-P
This is my first attempt at isolating the subject by faking the DoF in Photoshop, using layer masks and Gaussian blur. Compare it with the original below and tell me what you think.