Named after Bea Arthur, Bea does Bea things. She is what some would call flighty and perhaps a little slow. We, however, assume she is running about doing Bea things, taking care business and generally being cute. As this is a full time job for her, we let her be.
I love the shallow DoF (Depth of Field) this 35mm f/2 lens gives me. Fully open at about 1 foot from her face, it gives a focal plane of about 1 inch, which for this was perfect. For a human person it might be a little to shallow. Their, eyes may be sharp, but their ears and nose might be out of focus.
For a given lens at a given focal length, 35mm in this case, there is a plane of focus in which subjects will appear to be 'in focus' or acceptably so. Imagine looking down a long hallway and focusing your camera at an object midway down the hall. That object and anything else in the frame that is in the same plane (parallel to the film plan and perpendicular to the lens axis) will be in focus. Objects behind and in front of that point will fall out of focus. Now imagine taking a group shot of people standing in front of you and all at the same distance from the camera. If you focused on the person in the middle, the people on the left and right should also be in focus for the most part. If however, there were to two rows of people, one behind the other, you may find that by focusing on the person in the middle of the first row will keep the first row in focus, but the back row will be out of focus.
There are two ways to handle this (oversimplified) scenario. The first is to stop the lens down, that is, to put your camera in A(perture Priority) mode and raise the F number. The second is to change the focal length of the lens if it is a zoom lens. Changing the F stop will decrease the amount of light being let into the camera, but will increase the depth of the plane of focus.
For Bea, this would have brought her nose and ears in focus. If you zoomed in your lens, you are changing its focal length which has a similar effect.
By controlling the aperture and focal length of your lens you can create images that reflect what you saw in your mind and made you pick up your camera to begin with.
This post was originally written 4 years ago, Bear has since passed, to our great sadness. She was affectionate, and gentle, and weach miss her very much.
