a little fuzziness is oh so nice

say hello to sam as seen through my old canon ae-1, a 30 or 40 year-old metal body slr.

i've heard people say they want to get away from the "point-and-shoot" look and get a "nice camera" that takes great pictures with "fuzzy backgrounds", etc. i've also heard of people going out and buying an slr hoping to get those great pictures but then being disappointed with the point-and-shoot-like results from their expensive new slr.

so what's the problem? how do you escape the grasp of the point-and-shoot?


their are two solutions to start with - both relatively easy to implement. interestingly enough, the camera actually has little to do with the problem.

the first is the flash. if you just use the default flash settings you'll get a very brightly lit picture just like a point-and-shoot camera will give you. you can usually set the flash to a "fill flash" setting or manually tone it down so it's not so intense. and don't be afraid to bump up the iso setting in low light. but this is all beside the point, i want to talk about the fuzzy backgrounds that are oh so nice.

the fuzziness is caused by shallow depth of field and the two things that effect depth of field are the size of the aperture (bigger = shallower depth of field) and magnification (higher magnification = shallower depth of field). as for the magnification, think about macro photography or telephoto photography - both magnify the subject quite a bit and therefore produce shallow depth of field. this leaves big apertures to do the work when it comes to normal shots of people and such.


back to the problem - most new slr's come with zoom lenses (everybody loves zoom lenses, right?) and most zoom lenses don't have very big maximum apertures so it's a bit more difficult to get the fuzzy effect with these lenses.

solution? sacrifice the zoom capability and get a fixed focal length (non-zoom) "normal" lens. something around a 50mm lens should be good. just make sure the lens has a big maximum aperture - you can find this right in the description of the lens. it will say something like "Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF Nikkor Lens" - the number 1.8 is the maximum aperture. remember that with apertures the smaller the number is the larger the aperture will be, so an "f/1.8" lens is pretty good.


all the pictures in this post were taken at f/1.8 (wide open) at about 1/60 or 1/125 second on 400 speed kodak tri-x film without a flash.

these lenses are also very inexpensive - usually somewhere around 100 bones. you'll have to zoom with your feet instead of the lens but that's a small price to pay for a big aperture.

a little more pinhole

here are a couple more pinhole photographs for your enjoyment...


this is an old abandoned office next to where i worked during college - it was pretty trashed on the inside and kind of falling apart in some places. for some reason i'm fascinated by old abandoned structures. seeing them is like talking to someone from an older generation - they have stories and experiences that you can't find anywhere else.


this is another picture taken with my panoramic pinhole camera. this is the sun setting over the beach at ocean shores, washington. i took this while on a road trip with a good friend. this was our first stop in washington on our way up to seattle. beautiful place.

this next photograph isn't a pinhole image but rather a picture i took to help demonstrate how images get flipped upside down and backwards when they pass through a pinhole or a lens.


the image is passing through one of my large format lenses and being projected onto the wall.

one more thing - during my last semester of college i had a technical writing class. for my final project i wrote a manual on how to build and use your own pinhole camera. so if you already have a basic knowledge of photography and you'd like to make and use your own here's a link to a pdf version of my manual. look for the box with the link that says "click here to start download".