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Tuesday, January 12, 2016

a new phase

hi,
it's me again. I have started a new phase in my creative live: Illustration! please visit my new website gemmadriessen.com I have worked really hard on my new website and it looks really good in my opinion :) . I am currently open for commissioned work so if you are looking for someone to make you a birth announcement card, a logo, a drawing of a whale riding a motor bike because you are really into that for some reason, or whatever please don't hesitate to contact me (see contact page on my site) :) I am also starting a new blog about drawing and illustration over there. :)


Thursday, October 23, 2014

a little reminder, Gem&Em

Hi folks,
I just wanted to remind you of my new blog. As you know I stopped blogging here, and started blogging at Gem&Em. There I blog together with my friend Emma. Here are a couple of projects we shared over there:
From left to right: twisted bandana hairdo, DIY vinyl record notebook, Why I love analog photography, DIY backdrop earring. These posts are all by me.
Emma likes to share delicious recipes on our blog, Like this one for oven dried apples, and this one for Chia pudding with banana-peach sorbet.

I hope you'll hop over and take a look at our new little space :)
love,
Gemma 

Saturday, August 9, 2014

I am moving to a new blog


Hi guys,
this summer I went to Finland to visit my friend Emma. (read about it here). Emma and I both like blogging, and so we decided to create a new blog, together. I will be posting about the same things I have been posting here, though I'd like to make it a little more personal. The blog is still very young and a tiny bit under construction but I feel like it's ready to be shown to the world. I would love it if you guys take a look there! And maybe follow along.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

7 ways to create beautiful depth of field in your photos

Wanna make photos like the one below? Then I have 7 great tips for you. These are things I learned during photography and from other articles like this. Depth of field is the the area that is in focus in your photo. So Wen you have a shallow depth of field only your subject is in focus, when your depth of field is very big, everything is in focus. Not all of the tips work with phone camera's, but hey there is a reason people buy fancy cameras. So lets get started!
1. Aperture
The aperture controls the amount of light that can come through your lens, it consists of blades that can narrow the 'hole' in your lens. You can see it in the pictures above. The size of the hole is indicated by the f-number, the smaller the number the bigger the hole (this might be a little confusing at the beginning). So f/4,5 is bigger than f/29. The size of your aperture influences the depth of field. You can see this in the photos on the right. So if you want everything blurry except for your subject, choose a low f-number.

All DSLR's have an option to set the size of the aperture, mostly its called aperture priority mode or just A. Some compact camera's have this option too, Phones however never have this function because they have a fixed aperture.
2. get close to the subject
The closer you get to your subject the blurrier the background will become.

3. create a bigger distance between your subject and the background
This will make the background less in focus and therefor less sharp.
4. zoom in
When you zoom in on your subject the effect will be similar to getting your camera closer. This only works with optical zoom (when your lens gets larger) and not for digital zoom (the thing phone camera's do when they zoom in). Digital zoom is just cropping your photo and doesn't change anything about the depth of field.
5. get a camera with a bigger sensor
The size of your sensor has huge impact on your photo quality, and also on the depth of field. The bigger the better. Phone cameras have really small sensors, compact camera's a little bigger onces and DSLR's have quite big onces. In the picture you can see the different in sizes of phone and slr camera sensors.
6. Editing
You can also blur your background with some photo editing. You can do it with photoshop, instagram, picmonkey and numerous other apps and programs. But as you can see in the photo above is the blur different. Personally I think real blur to be much prettier. With real blur I mean blur that is created by using one of the other options in this article.
7 free lensing
Free lensing is an awesome technique you can try with cameras that have interchangeable lenses. I wrote a post about how it works a while ago. Free lensing can make the depth of field very narrow. It has the same result as a tilt and shift lens but those are quite expensive.

I hoped this helped you guys! If you know an other technique on getting a shallow depth of field please share it in the comments, I'd love to learn more!