Depth of Field

Painted Lady Butterfly

I thought I would share one of my recurring photography mistakes with you. As you may have noticed I take quite a few macro shots, my macro lens tying with my compact Canon Ixus 60 as my best ever buy. However, it does pull me into making the same mistake time after time.

As noted in my previous post I had the intention of taking some photos of Painted Lady butterflies on the first sunny Saturday that we had in a while. I did manage this goal, but a lot of the shots were not as good as they could have been if I had sufficient depth of field. The problem with a macro lens is that it has only a very small distance where the subject is completely sharp. If you want to know more about depth of field you will find some great and helpful info on this website.

In theory, reducing the size of the aperture should help this problem as it provides greater depth of field, but, if you are taking a picture outdoors of something that moves you need to be able to use a fairly fast shutter speed even if you are using a tripod. I have a plethora of pictures to prove this to be the case. As you can see from the photo, most of the butterfly is in focus and sharp, particularly the back wing. However, the depth of field is not sufficient to get the front wing in focus as well, which, to me, spoils an otherwise good shot of a butterfly.

The shot was taken at ISO200, shutter speed 1/250s and aperture f/10.

I did get a shot of a Painted Lady that I am really pleased with, and I will share that in my next post.