DSLR in manual ?

[gbb]

Re-aquainting myself with photography, and a couple of things spring to mind.

With a 'normal' SLR, your lens would show you the depth of focus according to the Fstop you used at a specific range (IIRC)

There isnt half the info on DSLR lens's...so wherejagetit???

Being lazy of course, trying to find the right page in the manual...but impatience is getting the better of me

 

[andrew_s]

"Normal" depth of field indications haven't been normal for quite a while - since autofocus became normal, well before digital.
a) lots of lenses are zooms
lots of lenses have no aperture ring
c) lots of lenses don't have much of a focussing ring.

Nowadays you have to make sure you buy a camera with a DOF preview.

Such is the march of progress

Edit:
I see it's a Nikon D40.
This model has no DoF preview - all you can do is check the picture afterwards.

 

[Crackle]

What did you get? a lot have a DOF button. The trouble with Digital is that you can virtually guarantee everything will be in focus, it's getting it out which is the problem - circles of cinfusion and all that, what!

 

[John the Monkey]

"Normal" depth of field indications haven't been normal for quite a while - since autofocus became normal, well before digital.
a) lots of lenses are zooms
lots of lenses have no aperture ring
c) lots of lenses don't have much of a focussing ring.

Nowadays you have to make sure you buy a camera with a DOF preview.

Such is the march of progress

Indeed - as a user of a lot of older Nikon equipment, I find the "G" type lens particularly irritating, as it needlessly renders obsolete some very nice gear indeed (although I've some nice pre-AF primes to use with my F3).

On digital, the best bet seems to me to be to shoot with the lenses you use a lot (easy enough to do, given that the only cost is in memory card space and time spent sorting the results out). Over time you'll get the feel for the "right" aperture in a given situation - looking at the EXIF will help with that. (Although saying that, my D70 does have DoF preview...)

 

[John the Monkey]

The trouble with Digital is that you can virtually guarantee everything will be in focus, it's getting it out which is the problem - circles of cinfusion and all that, what!

...which does make digital terrific for landscapes and macros

 

[gbb]

No DOF preview, i realise that now i read the specs and manual.
The one reason i wanted it was so i could photo some equipment, but blur out the annoying and irrelevent background.
I'm working on it, but my last camera was a bog standard Minolta SLR...yup...things have come a long way

Thanks for the replies....

 

[Crackle]

No DOF preview, i realise that now i read the specs and manual.
The one reason i wanted it was so i could photo some equipment, but blur out the annoying and irrelevent background.
I'm working on it, but my last camera was a bog standard Minolta SLR...yup...things have come a long way

Thanks for the replies....

Photoshop and layers: There are lots of tutorials on the interweb about how to do it. You paint the blur back in.

Basically you open your image and then create a 2nd layer which you blur. Make the first layer live and use a brush to paint in the 2nd layer where you want blur. Using more layers allows you to get very sophisitcated.