Easy Tricks - depth of field

I have always looked at depth of field photos with some jealousy. To the unskilled like myself, they seem well out of reach of the normal user and by all accounts you need to fiddle about with the settings on the camera to achieve good results. 

Turns out I was wrong. This is one of the easiest effects to achieve. My results are pretty ordinary but if I had kept going I could have done better. The simple solution is to find an item with a background you would like to be out of focus. Stand away from the item and zoom in to it, the further you zoom in, the more out of focus the background becomes.

No prizes coming to me for any of the examples I have put on here, but you get the point

Another

And another, I am flying now...

First attempt

And here you can see my point. There is no colour to the sky and the focus is all over the place. More learning to be done.

Longer exposures and the need for a tripod

Well I can see that this looks something of a mess. However, it is a lot better than my earlier attempts. The Nikon tries to force the flash in any occasion so you need to force it off and play around with the length of exposure. I will try and post up the earlier disasters. 

I sound almost like I know what I am talking about but this is not the case. Changing the exposure changes the amount of time the shutter is left open and therefore changing the amount of light allowed into the image. I think! My earlier attempts gave me a dark and out of focus attempt. As I don't yet have a tripod I could only do marginally longer exposures and try and support it against something. 

This was the best I could get, but in reality the moon was perfectly clear not the bodged mess I achieved. But it still gives some indication of the strange skyline that night.