Blurry Backgrounds, Photo Duds, and Pancakes Mixes (Yup, it’s a Q&A post!)

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I have a photography question. I’ve been taking pictures for awhile (digital SLR) and am slowly making improvements. I really love how a lot of your pictures are in very sharp focus for part of it, but the background/foreground (depending on the picture) is out-of-focus. I’ve done a little reading (trying to achieve this myself), and everything seems to point back to depth-of-field. However, my experiments with adjusting the depth-of-field have been mixed…not exactly what I’m going for. How do you achieve this? Is it a particular setting on your camera?

Thanks,
Jennifer

Yep, a shallow depth of field is what you’re wanting, and it’s great you have an SLR, because a shallow depth of field is really tough to achieve on most point and shoot cameras (They’re designed to easily keep everything in the frame sharp and focused.)

Depth of field just refers to how many planes are in focus. For instance, say you lined up 10 pumpkins in front of you, each one further away than the next. A shallow depth of field would ensure that only the pumpkin you focused on would be sharp, and all the ones before and behind it would be blurry.

(I hope that makes sense!)

For instance, in this photo, I focused on the nearest crust of this oven pancake, and the area behind it is not in focus.

To get this look, you want to shoot with a fairly wide aperture setting. I usually have mine set somewhere between 2.0 and 3.5.

Also, to make sure that your camera has exactly the right thing in focus, you should manually choose your focal points. I’m not sure what SLR you have, but all of them should allow you to do that. The camera can automatically choose focal points, but sometimes it chooses the wrong one, and when you’re shooting with a wide aperture, that can be bad news.

If you have a Canon SLR and you really want that blurry background look, I highly recommend the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 . I use that lens probably 95% of the time, and almost all of the pictures on this blog from 2010 and beyond were taken with it. It’s $339, but it is so, so worth it if you take pictures a lot.

If you don’t have a Canon, you still should be able to find a 50mm 1.4…I know Nikon makes one, and I imagine other SLR manufacturers do as well.

I have a picture-related question for you for a Monday post. I took a great picture of my daughter yesterday except…I chopped off about 4 inches of her head. It is such a shame too cause her face, eyes, and freckles are so clear but the only way to recover it is to make it a close up face shot and crop more of her face out like I did it on purpose.

So what do you do with scrap pictures? Do you save them for possible later use or do you ditch pictures that don’t turn out? I wondered this because you often speak of picture surfing for old shots to use. I could just imagine how long it would take you if you saved every slightly-fuzzy shot.

-Amanda

Well, how I handle this all depends on how busy I’ve been! If I have extra time, I sort through my photos more thoroughly and delete duds or extras. But if things have been a little crazy, then my files end up being a little more, um, uncurated.

I do usually delete photos that are total duds (super crooked or blurry, for instance.)

Something that helps me a LOT is to make a new folder for pictures each month. That way it’s fairly easy for me to find an old picture as long as I know what year and month it might have been taken in.

(Can you tell this is a folder that I haven’t sorted through very well??)

Or even if all I remember is the season, I can usually scroll through the months from that season and find what I’m looking for.

Is there a way to pre-mix your dry ingredients and store them and just add wet ingredients when you’re ready to bake? I make pancakes every weekend and have been using a mix 🙁 but would like to know what I’m feeding the family.

-Becky

Yep! You could just mix up all the dry ingredients from my buttermilk pancake recipe, store them in a bag or airtight container, and add the liquid ingredients when you’re ready to make your pancakes.

And to get ahead on things, you could make extra mixes for next time. Just measure out the dry ingredients for several batches into separate bags (for a single recipe, each bag would have a cup of flour, a tablespoon of sugar, and so on).

I personally don’t find it to be super time consuming to mix up the dry ingredients each time, so I’ve never bothered to make a mix. But hey, if it keeps you from consuming baking mix with questionable ingredients, go for it! And I bet you’ll find that the made-from-scratch pancakes taste way better (Don’t be tempted to sub milk for the buttermilk. Real buttermilk makes all the difference.)

Oh, and here’s the recipe I use for whole wheat buttermilk pancakes.

Now I’m kind of hungry for pancakes topped with whipped cream. Mmmm…whipped cream. I love it so.
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Joshua’s 365 post: Rhacodactylus