DOF help with pet portraits

beetle8

I had a portrait shoot with birds yesterday and have done dogs before. I've used variable ap and 2.8 zooms up to this point but I'm having a dof issue. I'm learning every day, so even at f8 if I'm zoomed in the dof is razor thin. Any lens sugestions? I was thinking a 50 prime. With the animals moving around I need more of a margin of error.

LouwPhotography

beetle8 wrote:

I had a portrait shoot with birds yesterday and have done dogs before. I've used variable ap and 2.8 zooms up to this point but I'm having a dof issue. I'm learning every day, so even at f8 if I'm zoomed in the dof is razor thin. Any lens sugestions? I was thinking a 50 prime. With the animals moving around I need more of a margin of error.

Do you have any examples? On our recent Galapagos trip, we shot birds galore. Generally I was around f7.1 using a 100-400mm and I thought they came out okay from a DOF perspective. Given that you'll be able to adjust your distance something that long would be overkill, but maybe I would opt for a 70-200 or 24-105 just to give you some zoom flexibility?

cmason

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

LouwPhotography

cmason wrote:

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

Now that's a cool link! Thanks!

beetle8

cmason wrote:

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

Absolutely a great tool, thank you so much
I'll be spending a lot of time here reading the related articles, but the calculator let me know that the combination I was using gave me less than 3/4 of an inch of DOF.

cmason

beetle8 wrote:

Absolutely a great tool, thank you so much
I'll be spending a lot of time here reading the related articles, but the calculator let me know that the combination I was using gave me less than 3/4 of an inch of DOF.

Glad to be of help...there is a link on that site to a DOF chart that I have printed out and keep in the camera bag, good for 'sanity' checks

beetle8

I will do that, but what I also did was DL the ap for my iPhone, very easy to use and cool.