A few days ago I put up this photograph taken with a Ricoh GRIII. As you can see, the background is quite noticeable. It is a plain background (the wall of a Public House) but it is still obvious as a background.
So a day or two later I went out with my full frame Canon R60 and had another go. As you can see, the background is now more even. And that is entirely down to the aperture and the distance of the camera to the subject.
As I said in the earlier article, I wasn’t thinking about the aperture too much when I used the Ricoh. The metadata tells me the aperture was f5.0
The aperture on the Canon was f2.0 – which gives a lot shallower depth of field, meaning the front-to-back distance that is in focus.
And there is a knock-on effect that has a lot to do with the way a particular lens is made (the lens elements and the formulas used to construct the lens) and the focal length of the lens used to take the photo. It affects the way the image transitions from sharp to not sharp. Look at the edges of the petals and you maybe can see what I mean.
I am not going to talk about the relative depths of field of full frame cameras (the Canon) versus the APS-C crop of the Ricoh. You can read people pull each other’s arguments to pieces in photography forums.
Not to do with photography per se, but the colour of the petals on the hollyhocks had faded noticeably between the two occasions.
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