I shouldn't really rise to the bait.
Ray you are a troll.
The sentence above is exactly why you will never understand what good photography is. Your obsession with numbers and pedantry is just that. It's a shame that so much good information in these forums gets buried and pointless threads like this one.
I should however thank you for the laugh when you told a (very competent) photographer that his graffiti was out of focus. Reminded me of these fake critiques:
http://theonlinephotographer.blogspot.com/2006/06/great-photographers-on-internet.html
Nick-T
Nick,
I think it's you who are offering a bait which I probably shouldn't rise to, but here goes.
First, as a teacher of photography I would advise you never to tell anyone that he will 'never understand what good photography is', because such statements can only be understood as a projection onto others of your own feelings and sense of inadequacy as a teacher.
Far better to adopt the principle, 'there are no bad students, only bad teachers'.
Secondly, how you can describe a concern about using the best F stop for a particular DoF, as being an 'obsession with numbers and pedantry', beats me.
Selecting the most approriate combination of F stop, ISO and shutter speed is the most basic procedure for anyone who uses a camera in manual mode. It affects such matters as DoF, sharpness at the plane of focus, motion blur and noise.
One of the great advantages of the digital system that provides EXIF information about every shot taken, is that it creates a learning feed-back process.
In the days of film, one would have to make a written note of the f stop and shutter speed of every shot, unless one's memory was very good and/or one took very few shots.
With digital, the comparisons between different combinations of F stop, shutter speed and ISO are easy to make, after the event, even long after the event, and hopefully one can learn from one's mistakes and get a sense, borne of experience, of the most appropriate f stop to use without taking out a measuring tape to find the precise hyperfocal point for the desired DoF (which is something I've never done, by the way, and something which I would call being a bit obsessive).
Now I don't mind your having a good laugh at my comment that the interesting background in a particular photograph was out of focus (way out of focus) and my enquiry as to whether or not that was deliberate.
I personally don't necessarily have a problem with an interesting background intruding upon the main subject. If I go out of my way to choose an interesting background, I would like that background to be 'in focus' if it adds to the general interest of the shot as a whole.
If the background is not interesting, is distracting or even ugly, then by all means get it out of focus as much as possible.
But to deliberately choose a background for its interest and then treat it as though it were any other background that requires to be out-of-focus, seems it bit questionable to me. (I'm entitled to my opinion, am I not?)
But again, I think you have missed the point. The main point of that remark was not to critique the photo, but to suggest that the OoF backround was a natural consequence of using an MFDB system. If the client is happy with the shot, then that's what counts. I wouldn't argue against that.
However, if I were the bridegroom in that shot, and the graffiti in the background was my own handywork, I might like it to be in focus.
So, my point was, with a good DSLR one would have the option of getting the background in or out of focus, without compromising image quality significantly.
With the MFDB there seems to me to be a tendency to always get the background OoF because to do otherwise compromises image quality as a result of stopping down into diffraction-limited F-stops, or raising ISO which reduces image quality more significantly on MFDB systems than on DSLRs.
Hope I've managed to clarify this for you, Nick
.
