The Narrative Image

“We think our camera is broken and are wondering if we should take it back.” said a colleague at work, describing her family’s new camera. “What’s making you think it’s broken? I asked. “Almost all the pictures are blurry,” she said. I immediately suspect camera motion and ask a few diagnostic questions. “Are you using the camera indoors or outdoors? Are you zooming in for tight close-ups? Are you taking action photos or staged portraits” Basically, she answers, “Yes.” “It’s probably camera-shake.” I offer. “But it has image stabilization! Do you think you could take a look at it?” I’m no expert, but in this situation, given that we both flounder at the low end of the clueless scale, I figured two heads would be better than one. I agreed to take a look at the camera, the camera manual, and some examples of the problem photos. Figure 1 F3.2 Shutter Speed 1/4 ISO 200 A presumably stationary Christmas ornament. This is an example of motion blur caused by camera movement. The Panasonic Lum...

I was monkey-ing around with depth of field the other night. FIGURE 1. In this image, the aperture value = 29, and the shutter speed , = 30 seconds under these dim lighting conditions. FIGURE 2. Here, the aperture value = 4.5, and the shutter speed = 1.3 seconds. There seems to be three main factors that affect the depth of field: The focal length of the lens, the aperture, and the distance of the subject in relation to the background and the lens. Here I tried to limit the variables to just the aperture. For these images the global values are: An 18-55mm zoom lens (in this case the focal length was set at 35mm). I also had the camera set to aperture priority. The sock monkey was sitting about 3 feet from the front of the lens, and approximately 4 feet beyond the monkey sits the monitor. The depth of field in Fig. 2 is quite narrow. The material in the chair immediately behind the monkey is already starting to blur (compare to Fig. 1) The monitor sets up a backlighting situation which ...