Experimenting with Depth of Field
In a recent issue of National Geographic, there was a cover story about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans. What made the story stood out for me was the accompanying photographs by David Burnett. Using a large format SpeedGraphic camera set at a very shallow depth of field, he created pictures that took on a fantastic quality making ordinary scenes of devastation seem surreal like a dream or a nightmare depending on your perspective. Quite compelling. This technique though is not unusual and can be accomplish through a standard tilt-shift lens. You can also duplicate the effect through Photoshop as well.
After coming across another article about photography using shallow DOF, I decided to give it a try. Since I do not have the right sort of equipment in doing it in the field, I used a popular technique using Photoshop software to simulate the effect. You can see this handiwork on my Flickr site. It is just a few photos taken from a variety of photosets.
The one limitation I had was that my photos generally do not make great subjects for this sort of technique which works best if you are positioned above a landscape, preferably one without people and have a quality of light that is bright and casts long shadows.
This is something that I will not spend much time on doing but it is a good illustration on what you can with some basic techniques using the Quick Mask tool and gradients.
