What F-stop should I be using?

Alright, I guess getting into the first question. It’s just a general kind of inquiry about f-sops (?) and kind of what’s the best for flare and what do you suggest for achieving blurry backgrounds and that type of stuff, so I guess Dave, do you want to start it off?

Dave: Okay. A great thing I learned about flare recently – not that recently, but a few years back that I previously didn’t have an appreciation of – is if you’re shooting with the sun being very close to being in your field of view or in the shot; if you’re shooting at like an F 2.8 or an F4 (?), you’re going to get a huge glow of white fuzz, where if you shoot at an F11 or F22 – and obviously compensate with your shutter speed – you’ll actually get a starburst instead.

And that goes the same for shooting night scenes, like when you’re shooting night portraits. So basically you’re going into smaller aptitude and then numbers align (?) like F11, F22 gives you a starburst with long lens rather than that glow. (*I’m not 100% sure if I have this transcription right.)

Taylor: I’m going to sidetrack us for a second and talk about light painting. I don’t know, you did this a couple weeks ago where you just set up the camera on a tripod and crank it up – if you’re at F11, it’ll give you that nice starburst – and set it at like a three-second shutter, and that’s just the right amount of light that you need, and go around with some flashlights and pane that type of stuff.

Dave: Totally. I was shooting in an abandoned – well, the old Kodak headquarters for Kodak Canada and we cruised in there and we didn’t want one too many exposures because it’s pitch black inside, but like an F11 and you just go around, and as you paint, you walk around with a video light or a torch or whatever and as you paint the walls, zap shows up.

If you don’t know what painting with light is, check it out – Google that, and you’ll see some pretty cool stuff.

Taylor: So it’s whenever you see floating letters or just cool colours that obviously shouldn’t be there. Or if you’ve ever Jeff Newsom’s orb or circular things that I don’t think – well, some people probably know how he does them, but . . .

Dave: They’re a bit of a mystery to everyone else.

Taylor: Yep, they’re a mystery. And he does amazing, amazing painting with light and yeah, I just think it’s really cool.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: And another thing: on the small scale for concerts and stuff like that, whenever I was shooting them, if I was shooting kind of close up [or in] close proximity with bands that have a little more energy, I would typically drag the shutter just a little bit – or actually pre-drag it – and set my flash to rear curtain so it fires whenever the shutter closes. And then just let a little bit of light in there and get a bit of blur, and then recompose the shot and hit it with my flash at the very end. That way, it will freeze out the singer or whoever overtop all of the light and blur that’s going on behind him.

Dave: Yeah, that looks really good.

Taylor: It’s fun to play around. I don’t know, it gets a little tired, I suppose, and looks a little amateur-ish at times, but for the most part, it’s just fun to do – it’s just something fun.

Dave: Totally.

Taylor: Alright, and I guess the second part of that was: “what’s the best for blurry backgrounds?”

Dave: Yeah, I think especially when people are newer to photography, they often try to achieve that really buttery, blurry background look with a sharp subject, and really the easiest way to do that is to use pro-lenses – like two grand plus lenses. On Canon, they’re called L-series – what are they called on Nikon?

Taylor: Just lenses.

Dave: Just nice lenses, because all Nikon’s lenses are good.

Taylor: Yep, all Nikon are good for the most part.

Dave: But yeah, basically using those pretty expensive bits of glass.

Taylor: They just let a lot more light in.

Dave: F2.

Taylor: So the more light you’re letting in, typically the blurrier the background’s going to be, kick out for you.

Dave: And we could go on and on about the physics of lights and aperture.

Taylor: Yes, because we are physics professors.

Dave: But we won’t because we don’t know enough about it.

Taylor: Yeah, the easiest way is I guess the actual depth of field is controlled by the focal length as well as the amount of light that’s being let in. So even if you have a lens that is maybe a 5.6 or something like that – if you zoom it all the way and say it’s a 300 ml zoom – you’ll still get a pretty nice blur. The only issue is that you have to honestly be like a football field away to do so.

Dave: And keeping the subject along that off that background as well. And an easy way to do that is to have the subject relatively close to you – like maybe 20 metres away from you – and then the background 50 to 100 metres away, you generally get more relative (blur ?).