Return to Dark Depth of Field
There is a special spot in my heart for photographic gadgets.
The absolute truth is that any camera can capture amazing photos, although, if you enjoy painting with light, you will encounter the limits of your equipment. I encountered a pretty significant limit when I upgraded my camera.
The new addition to my camera body collection, does not have a built in speedlight. As a matter of fact: The camera sports very little flash controls at all. From the D70s, which could use its pop up light to control Nikon's creative lighting system, the upgrade brought me to a camera that wouldn't even let me set the most basic flash configurations. My business partner showed off his new toy's ability to rule the configuration of the intricate system of lights. A feeling of complacency held me in place, as I still had eyelid burning power that could be radio controlled. All I needed was extra time, to wander about with my light meter and individually set each of the lights to the level that was desired.
At this point, I slammed into a physical limit. The cheapo radio setup we employed, could only synchronize the camera and flash units to about one two hundredth of a second. We have shots taken at around 1/250th of a second and you can see the tail edge of the shutter on the frame. After we figured out the culprit of the large black bar at the bottom of the image, it was soon chalked up as another constraint that would be placed on the photographer's endless battle balancing Sensitivity, Aperture and Shutter Speed.
Finally, I snapped. Constantly tormented with deals on kijiji, I drove myself down to the camera store and secured myself a Nikon SB-900 speedlight. Despite the fact that it is valued more than a sane person would part with for an entire camera system, I can say that it is one of the best purchases that I have made to date. Quite simply: the SB-900 is amazing.
The first benefit is that I can now properly control Nikon's lighting system. Related to this, is that Nikon's system will synchronize with my camera to a whopping 1/8000th of a second. That is 32 times as fast as the el-cheapo radio gadgets that were previously used. Better yet, that synchronization speed can be maintained firing any wireless slaves.
To most, that increase in shutter speed is not a big deal. But for one who needs to be aware of all light sources, it is a great boon. You see, with the three sided balance of Sensitivity, Aperture and Shutter Speed, I have now gained a lot more control over one part of the triangle. Since increasing Sensitivity usually leads to more noise and grain (not a bad thing!), I usually leave that part of the equation alone. What the faster shutter has brought, is more latitude in playing with my aperture. And the juiciest part of playing with aperture, is manipulating depth of field.
I now have the control to have my camera wide open, narrowing my depth of field to fractions of your favorite measurement, without having the ambient light stomp all over my picture. Most would brush this off, as all small photos appear in focus, so the bombardment of crap encountered on facebook and through e-mail appear to be cut from a sheet of awesome. Take a look at the above photo. It isn't until you take a look at it full size that you see that the razor sharp focal plane is not on the front of the subject's eye. Most will forgive, and although the lens is sharp enough to resolve individual blood vessels, one can see that the plane of focus is very, very thin. Shooting at f/2.8 narrowed the depth of field considerably, and the artistic non-focus of this shot was all but lost to me days ago.
