Paul, what effect is that called with the focus in your picture? The small group of flowers in focus? I know digital photography uses the same settings as film for focus techniques. Depth of field, shutter speed,.
What setting would get the entire picture framed in yours to be entirely focused?
Depth of Field, Fred, controlled by the size of the lens aperture. You then use other variables to produce an image that is correctly exposed. Larger aperture -- think of a dilated pupil in your eye = shallow depth of field. Smaller aperture, like f16, f22 or more, is like a pinhole film camera where everything is in focus despite the fact there's no glass lens ! Optical science is neat stuff.
I try to avoid automated settings as much as possible, and in this case, I think I dropped the ISO down to 80, activated a neutral density filter, put the shutter speed way high, and opened the aperture to 2.8 or so. This let me have a very shallow depth of field, where the area in focus is reduced behind and in front of the subject (the flowers).
I took nearly the same shot on a camera phone which does not allow manual settings, and the depth of field is very large. As you can see, the in-focus zone covers the flowers all the way back to the US Capitol. Presuming the simple cameraphone lens uses a small aperture setting to minimize its need to focus, within whatever shutter speed it can muster.
On your point about internet viewing and "email size" photos. It's not just the file size alone that determines detail. This file below is less than 700K in size, but the detail is not bad. I think it's more a matter of height/width as portrayed on your monitor. If you have a 1920x1080 monitor, then the original image ought to be at least that size so that the computer doesn't have to "enlarge" as you would in film, from say a 640x480 shot.
The whole "email size" concept dates back to dialup telephone internet service. Go larger.
Back to the depth of field discussion. The hot ticket among Digital SLR cameras right now is the
Canon 5D. Gorgeous images and the camera will shoot high definition video besides. The key difference making it better than almost any other SLR on the market is the size of the sensor field. Think of it as using a larger-format piece of film than say 35mm, where there's more information delivered without pixel self-noise.
To give you an idea of the quality, we are using the 5D to shoot selected television productions at work, instead of the full size $30,000 broadcast video cameras. The shows want the video version of that shallow depth of field look like you see in that first shot you commented on.
Problem is, that kind of focus is tricky in most news environments where stuff is moving. It's okay for sit-down interviews or other controlled environments where you can collect focus and the subject stays in a narrow range. So for video the 5D will be a specialized camera. It's also kinda of peculiar to use the physical layout of an SLR camera to shoot video. Doesn't feel right when you pan and tilt, and it's more difficult to be on the move and try to keep the subject framed correctly. Another controlled-environment matter.
