An eye for depth of field

A very interesting, informative, frustrating and enlightening session today. I decided to take the monopod for a walk hop and also explore the depth of field (DOF) available to me. I took dragon, damsel, butterfly, ladybird, bee and ant shots.

At first, the monopod seemed clumsy and cumbersome, but after persisting with it for an hour and a half, I started to get more comfortable and slick with it. I definitely thought that the camera was a lot more stable and was looking forward to the processing.

I took a lot of shots with higher F-numbers in the hope of seeing better DOF, I also took lower F-number shots for comparison. I did a sprinkling of macro too, including my first ant shots with the new equipment.

As I started the processing of the 238 images collected, I was horrified at the failure rate. My first thoughts were that there was something going on between the monopod rigidity and the vibration reduction mechanics in the lens. But as I started to investigate the properties of the images, everything with an F-number greater than 16 was a blurry reject!

The sharpest shots were F8 and F11, I did not shoot anything wider than F8 in the session. This has to be a problem or limitation of the lens and I am extremely disappointed. The really annoying thing was that a new bee presented and all the fifty shots that I took were at F25. I managed to rescue a couple of images with liberal use of the sharpen function, but that is not the way to go.

Tomorrow I will persist with the monopod and limit the F-number to F11 max, with a few F16's for test purposes. I really need to do a controlled tripod test to confirm these findings.

Unfortunately I did not nail any of the ant shots (F18), but one was very close but did not capture what I was looking for. I did get some great dragon shots, but decided to put up the damsel eye as a follow up to my DOF comment yesterday. This was taken at approaching minimum distance and at F8, you can begin to see how shallow the DOF really is.

I am sure some of you are thinking that I am being a tad pedantic, but the discovery of the higher F-number failure rate has made the whole exercise justifiable. I just want to be able to go out there and shoot with confidence. If I shoot something special, I don't want to get stressed out, worrying about the processing. Anyone who thinks photography is point and shoot is sadly mistaken or very fortunate to have outstanding equipment, my overflowing recycling bin tells me that I am not so lucky.

For those interested, I put the rest in folio.

Dave