were allowed. I was shooting with a Sigma
14mm f/1.8 lens. An aperture this large is a life
saver in dark interiors where you are forced to
handhold the camera, but obviously the depth
of field from an f/1.8 lens aperture is super
shallow. Therefore, I closed the lens down to
f/5.6. On a telephoto lens, f/5.6 doesn’t provide
much DOF at all, but on the ultra wide 14mm,
it worked. Everything is in focus.
Due to the dim environment, however, that
forced the shutter speed to be 1/30th of a sec-
ond, and the ISO had to be raised to 3200. I
knew from experience that handholding a
camera with a shutter this slow only works 1)
when using an ultra wide lens, 2) when you
brace yourself with a wide stance, and 3) when
you gently squeeze the shutter button while
holding your breath. So, that’s what I did and
it worked.
Real world DOF scenario #
Macro photography, virtually without excep-
tion, requires complete depth of field. In my
frog and reptile workshop, the tiny poison dart
frogs only have visual impact when they aretotally sharp. We use macro lenses (either a
50mm or 100mm), and this means with greater
magnification, DOF is lost. Therefore, I recom-
mend participants in the workshop use f/22 or
f/32 exclusively. The diminished light, though,would mean the shutter speed would be too
slow and the ISO would have to be too high in
the artificial light of the hotel conference room.
The solution is to use a flash, and my flash of
choice is a ring flash. Placed close to the tiny
subjects, this provides enough light for an ap-
erture of f/32 with an ISO setting of 400. The
photo on the next page illustrates the results. §