March 12, 2010
tips for shooting (photography of cuourse:) a group of 22?
JeepLover asked:
so i am soing my first LARGE group on sunday and the only two lenses i have for my nikon d40 is a 18-55 mm and a 55-200. i want to make sure that the people on the outher edges are NOT blury or distored. any advice? i heard that adjusting my app to 10 or 11 may work?
Kayley
so i am soing my first LARGE group on sunday and the only two lenses i have for my nikon d40 is a 18-55 mm and a 55-200. i want to make sure that the people on the outher edges are NOT blury or distored. any advice? i heard that adjusting my app to 10 or 11 may work?
Kayley
Comments on tips for shooting (photography of cuourse:) a group of 22?
Anabel
and
Maxim
well your large group is not going to be standing all on one plane….side by side, are they….NO…You will probably have them arranged in 3-4 rows…
Therefore, you will want to shoot with a small aperture for sure (small being a higher humber…..11 will likely be good.
use a tripod. depending on the lighting conditions, getting to f11 might require reducing your shutter speed more than you thought you would need to.
why would you even be thinking of 10 for an aperture?
apertures run 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22
each of these numbers means either a doubling or a halving in size of aperture….
10 is just a third of a stop somewhere between 8 and 11
Macie
What you have here is a Depth of Field (DOF) problem. Three factors control DOF:
1) The f-stop used.
2) The focal length of the lens.
3) Subject distance.
Your subject placement will be critical as well. If you can place them in 3 rows with a minimum distance between each row (perhaps 2′ or 3′ or so) it will minimize your DOF problem.
Go here: and use the DOF Calculator to compute your DOF.
Suppose you use your 18-55mm lens at 24mm. If the center row is 10′ away from you and you focus precisely on that row, using f16 will give you a DOF of from 3′-9” to infinity. So anything from 6′-3” in front of your subject row at 10′ to as far as you can see - infinity - will be in focus. What if we really don’t want our focus to extend to infinity? Lets try f5.6, again with a 24mm lens. Focused on the row at 10′, our DOF is now from 6′-3” to 24′-6”. So anything from 3′-9” in front of our subject row at 10′ to anything 14′-6” behind it will be in focus. NOTE: If our rows are 3′ apart only 0′-9” in front of our closest row will be in focus. This should be sufficient unless someone has their arms folded in front of them. So don’t allow that to happen.
The above examples are directly from the DOF Calculator. You can compute DOF for any combination of f-stop, focal length and subject distance imaginable. The Calculator automatically takes any “crop factor” into account so the results are very accurate.
You will definitely want to use a tripod.