Yes, finally I bought the SLR and I hope it keeps my photography interest for at least next few months :-). I didn't do much research on buying the SLR. I was already biased to Canon, so I bought Canon T1i. Things that attracted me in this model are that it has 1080p HD recording, lens are cheaper than Nikon, and got it in a deal in Amazon :-).
My first experiment with my new camera is to feel the "Depth of field". Below photos give you a fair idea of what is Depth of Field.
Auto Mode
Shallow Depth of Field - Sharp Foreground and blurred background - Aperture Priority (Av) mode, Manual Focus, Av - f/5.6
Wider Depth of Field - sharp foreground & background - Aperture Priority (Av) mode, Manual Focus, Av - f/36
I used below items for this experiment.
1. Canon T1i with 18-55mm lens
2. Tripod
3. Laptop
4. Paper clips
I fit the camera to the tripod and adjusted the hight to the height of my table. I used tripod to avoid shake and to capture the same frame with different camera settings so that I can feel the difference of the camera settings. Connected my camera to my laptop for remote controlling the camera. I did this to see how it works :-), and also to avoid any shake in pressing the shutter button.
I set the dial to Auto mode and focussed the objects by moving over the mouse to the shutter button in the EOS utility. Once its focused, clicked the shutter button in the EOS utility. This results in the first photo. You can see that it automatically focused the clip at the far end and blurred the other two clips.
Now, I changed mode to Av and set the Av to F/5.6 and used manual focus to focus the nearest clip. This resulted in the second photo. You can see that the nearest clip is focused and other two clips are blurred. This is called as "Shallow Depth of Field". This is used to highlight only the object that we focus and blurs the background.
Now, I just changed the Av to F/36 and left every other settings as previous one. This results in the third photo. You can see that the picture is sharp almost till the farthest clip, The Depth of field is wider than previous photo.
I was so excited to see the results and thought for a second that I have become the professional photographer :-), though its a long way to go.
So, if we want to focus only the foreground object and blur the background then we need to set narrow aperture. Whereas if we want both the foreground and background to be sharp then we need to set a wide aperture.
To learn more about Depth of field you can refer to http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm.
