So you’ve pulled out your camera manual, figured out what your optical zoom level is (and how to make sure you don’t exceed it) and how to turn on macro, right? Good. Now you’re ready to begin playing around. Actually getting depth of field effects with a point & shoot can feel like trial and error until you begin to understand how your camera’s optics work, so get ready to take a whole lot of photos. It’s digital, you can always throw away the ones you don’t like, right?

To make life easy, let’s use a classic still-life arrangement. Grab some flowers, dried or fresh, and set them up in a place where you can a) stand about a foot away and photograph them and b) you have about 15 feet of space between the back of the flowers and the background. Just to mix it up, you’ll probably want to have a fairly interesting background so that the blurred stuff behind the flowers doesn’t look like a solid color. Throw one or two of your children into the background of the photo and make them stand there for an hour or so while you play around. It’ll be great for teaching them patience!

For the photos in this demo, I set up a chair with some dried flower on it in the grassy area between my neighbor’s house and ours. You can see that I’m not working with a very interesting subject or background, but the effect works, nonetheless. Keep reading for the juicy details of the photo shoot…

Start by turning on your camera, turning on macro, and then zooming in to the limit of your optical zoom. Some cameras make it hard to tell when it switches from optical zoom to digital, but on my Canon the zoom value on the LCD changes from black to blue when it goes to digital. Another good way to tell if you’re at the end of your optical zoom is listening to your camera. When you’re zooming using the lens, you can usually hear a mechanical whir that lets you know it’s using the lens to zoom. Digital doesn’t make any sound, since it’s not actually zooming.

So you’re all zoomed, right? Now turn on macro and hold your camera about a foot away from your subject (this is a really fun trick with a dog, especially when all they want to do is lick the camera) and press your shutter-release button halfway and hold it to auto-focus on your subject. I had to hold the Canon about a foot and a half to make auto-focus work, but with the Olympus I was able to get it closer. The reason for this difference is in how the camera manages auto-focusing, and how it handles macro as well. I’m going to assume you only have auto-focus, so play with the distance to make sure that your foreground is sharply focused.

Now look at the background through the LCD preview screen. Does it look blurry or clear? It should look blurry, or at least blurrier than normal. If the background is still pretty much in focus, you’ll need to play around with how far the background is (further will be blurrier) and how far away from your subject you are (closer will create a more dramatic depth of field effect). If you have some manual control of your camera, you may want to look into changing your F number. Lowering your F number will shorten your depth of field, creating a more dramatic background blur (examples: top is low F number, bottom is higher).

Once you get the right effect, hold your breath and push the shutter release button all the way. Click! You’re now officially a point & shoot trickster. Keep playing until you begin to get a feel for how your camera works. As you can see from my tests with my Olympus (the top photo) and Canon (much less blur), the greater the optical zoom, the better control you’ll have over depth of field. I was amazed at how much blurrier I could get the background with 3X optical zoom as opposed to 2X.

As a side note, when putting together your scene, it helps to have some good lighting. When I set the flowers outside, I made sure that I placed them in the sun so that the shadows accentuated the details of the flowers, making the foreground pop even more. In yesterday’s article, the tulips became warm and sleepy with the afternoon light shining through them. Anything you can do to make your foreground more interesting helps, so take time to set up your shot if you can.

Got questions about this process? Feel free to ask. Maybe we’ll get our resident experts to give their tips on how us amateurs can turn our point & shoot cameras into artistic tools.