Canon’s new 1D X is an impressive fusion of the old 1D and 1Ds lines, boasting state of the art sensor quality combined with impressive speed, but there’s one downside that may be a big disappointment to some photographers: the camera loses autofocus when used with lenses with a max aperture of f/8.

While there aren’t any Canon lenses that naturally have an f/8 maximum, adding a 1.4x extender to a f/5.6 lens or a 2x extender to a f/4 lens results in a lens with a max of f/8. If you’re planning on upgrading to a 1D X but need extended reach (e.g. you do bird photography), you may need to shell out some extra cash for a faster lens.

(via Arthur Morris via The Digital Picture)

If you’ve never used a rangefinder camera before, this video provides a visual look at how focusing works (a Leica M2 is used). Basically you’re given a second (smaller) image of the scene, and your goal is turn the focus ring until the two images match up for the subject you’d like to have in focus.
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The Frazier Ultimate lens is like the universe’s anti-matter to the Canon 50mm f/1.0 that we shared yesterday. Rather than have a tiny depth of field and tons of bokeh, the Frazier lens is one that has massive depth of field, allowing both the foreground and background of the image to be in focus at the same time. It’s widely used in Hollywood and in wildlife documentaries, and the video above shows some of the visual tricks you can do when having infinite DoF.

InfinityLens (via Reddit)

In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses.
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I had another go at the Bible Heart picture but this time with a tripod to properly hold the flash so that I could get consistent lighting and a ring instead of a UV filter.

This was my intial set up. I changed it a little bit later on but this is basically what it looked like.

I used all manual settings to see where the shadow was going at first, and ended up using some really weird settings. I was at f/20 for aperture (which I never do) and you can see that basically everything is in focus. Haha.

Ahh… Finally got the heart as I wanted it to look! The first picture is what the shadow looks like from above (obviously distorted); it’s that way because John 3:16 is more to the end of the Bible and the page heights are different. Then I had to play around with what angle to shoot from to get rid of the distortion. After I figured that out…it was time to change some settings and ring placement. I then reverted to f/2.8 so that I could pick and choose what was in focus.

Here’s an intial shot I took with the ring in focus. It doesn’t have much meaning to it though:

Here’s one of the final pictures. I made the ring out of focus on purpose and then focused on the word “loved.”

Then I really wanted a picture from that top view perspective so then I turned to the middle of the Bible and took another couple of pics.

Here’s the one I chose for the final for that:

This blog post was originally published here.

People often use a shallow depth of field in portraiture to separate a subject from the distracting background, allowing the face (more specifically, the eyes) to be in sharp focus while the background is blurred. Instead of doing this, sometimes I enjoy focusing on something closer towards me, putting the subject’s face out of focus instead and drawing the viewers attention to something else. Here are some examples:

Even if what you choose to focus on does not have any meaning or significance, it can still make the photograph much more interesting than if everything were in focus.

Here I blurred the face enough to bring attention to what I want the viewer to focus on, but not so much that the viewer cannot tell who the subject is or what the facial expressions are.

Combine the shallow depth of field with interesting angles and creative framing to spice up the portrait even more.

Using a shallow depth of field can help you communicate something about a person in a unique way. My friend Joseph often fell asleep on the floor of my room during long undergraduate nights. Here I chose to focus on his hand while telling the story in the blurred background.

Here I tried to make the photograph more interesting by combining a shallow depth of field, a unique angle, and a wide-angle lens.

How to Take This Type of Photograph

The main technique for taking this kind of photograph is to focus on something and then recompose the photograph before taking the picture. The two main factors that will affect how blurred the background are relative distance and the aperture.

For relative distance, the closer you move in toward what you’re focused on, the more blurred the things in the background (i.e. the face) will be. Thus, you might need to get in very close to the point you’re focusing on in order to throw the subject’s face out of focus, and doing this might require a wide angle lens.

Also, the larger your aperture is (lower f-number) the more blurred the background will become, so to achieve maximum blur you should use the lowest f-number your lens allows.

If you have any other suggestions, tips, or examples regarding this technique, leave a comment and share!