Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Shallowest depth of field for full-car photo (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by ibeinspire@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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I've been trying to work this out but I can't quite.

85mm f1.4 looks great

70-200 f2.8 @200mm looks great too (better?)

If you crop 85mm to 200mm you would get 200mm f3.3 equiv. So the 70-200 is actually better.

Ok so 105mm f1.4 exists... That's 200mm f2.66 equiv. 135mm f1.8 is the exact same equiv. But you have to crop (not ideal).

Is there anything better still?

Does subject distance matter? Maybe with a 50mm f1.2 but with you physically closer depth of field would be more shallow? Probably not.

I don't care about having the whole car in focus, I just want critical focus on one part and a super dramatic look.

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[–] partiallycylon@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Bigger sensor (mediums/large format) or bigger "equivalent" sensor. Basically zoom all the way in on your longest lens, set your focus and aperture, and take a panorama with however many photos it takes to fill the frame you want. You'll probably end up with hundreds of photos. Automerge them in Photoshop, and resize the resulting image to something more reasonable, unless you want it with gigapixel resolution. If you do it right (and by that I mean you don't miss a part of the photo resulting in a blank gap) or your computer doesn't run out of memory, it will absolutely have the effect you're and looking for. Source: I've done this many times with landscapes to tremendous success.

[–] ThrindellOblinity@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Aka the Brenizer Method

[–] ibeinspire@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Damn this is so cool

So I could use a wider focal length, get quite close to the car so there's a SUPER shallow dof and then take lots of pictures to make it fill the imaginary frame.

I will try! Thank you!

[–] partiallycylon@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Oh shit look at that, it has a name.

[–] Clayss654@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So you’re just doing a massive in close focus stack?

[–] partiallycylon@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

That would be way too extreme, I think. You back up to where the objects of interest (the one in focus) approximately fills the frame. Closer if the object is stationary. Then you just take a standard panorama at your widest aperture. Generally I've found once your final image goes beyond 35mm or 50mm equivalent field of view, the panorama fails to merge or the Photoshop function starts to make wacky assumptions about distortion.