Five Minutes to Fairytale Photos ~ Depth of Field

I think that the magic of a Disney vacation exists in three wonderful parts: the dreaming of planning, the pixie dust moments during trip itself and the memories you take with you for years to come.
Since I can't live in the Cinderella Castle Suite or even on property year round, pictures help bring a bit of the fairytale back into my everyday life.
In my enthusiastic pursuit of remembering the Magic, I take hundreds of my own pictures every vacation and hope to share a bit of my experience with you.

 One of the things I enjoy most about photography is how the depth of field can effect the emphasis of the shot. Including items of interest in the foreground and background of the photo allow the story of the picture to be more complete. Now with my iPhone pretty nearly ever shot comes out either crisp or, in the case of my perpetually moving children, not so crisp.

One very cute, slightly blurry pirate with an in focus crisp shirt, bandana, and drapery.

I have found that nothing but sheer volume of photos captures my children crisply. They move faster than shutter speeds. What about intentionally allowing for blurriness? Blurriness both emphasizes your subject and captures the sense of motion of a scene.

I achieve blurriness that assists a photo in one of three ways.

1) Faith

If you take a million jillion photos with a phone without using the focus feature on the screen, eventually you will capture something magical entirely without knowing how or what you are doing. I have the best luck if I get my subject centered and then pull it off to the side a bit but take the photo before the camera refocuses on something else.



Blurriness of the foreground and background focus the picture on our little pirate.

I bet if I tried to stage this shot again, it would never capture the exact way it did that night.  And I have several dozen duds taken both before and after this shot where my children were entirely blurry but the background stayed clear. So I just keep snapping away and enjoying the one in a million pixie dust that heads my way.

 

2) Trust

If you tap the screen to use the focus feature on the iPhone I find it often make other parts of the photo much less crisp. This lends an interesting perspective to the photo.

Ariel holding focus, compare to this photo of the same setup.

Ariel holds the focus of this shot despite a lot of different elements in the foreground and background. If you're willing to trust your camera playing with the zoom feature can be a ton of fun. If you have a real camera and want to learn about how to create extremely narrow depth of field using your aperture settings, I recommend this tutorial here. I'm sticking to my iPhone, because I already have it and it's convenient.  I trust it, so to speak.

 

3) Pixie Dust

Now is time to have a little fun with digital magic.

Pure Fairytale Photography with a little help from my iPhone

There's an app for that and I am just starting to get acquainterd with TiltShift. This app lets you play with the depth of field after the fact or while taking photos and save them back to your camera roll.  At $0.99, I think it's worthwhile. Anyway it's a fun new tool to tell your story.

“Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”

~Walt Disney

So get out there, make mistakes, get a little depth in your pictures, try a shot that shouldn't work, but might and see what fairytale photos follow you home.