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Tomorrow sees the opening of the 29th Summer Olympiad in China. It also sees Flickr attempt another social experiment, encouraging users to take a snapshot of life on 8-8-08.

Despite having some sympathies to the commericalism of Flickr, I still have a pro account and will be taking part (even though it is open to free accounts too).

No doubt Flickr and Yahoo will be hoping for many photos from China, and the rules for Flickr 888 basically give them the right to sell your photos for profit if they want to. Tomorrow my life won’t be as interesting but I’ve been spending the past week trying to spot potential photographs, and while I know one shot I’m intending to take, I have no inspiration for the rest of them. I’m going to have the camera with me all day, so I’ll see what comes out.

I’ve been quite keen to understand more about how to be ‘arty’ with photography, and have been experimenting with depth of field.

From what I’ve learned so far, the easiest way to alter depth of field is to switch the camera to Aperture Priority (Av), which allows you to manually set the Aperture.

My EOS 450D with the 18-55mm kit lens allows me to set apertures between F3.5 and F22. To see what the effect is of the different apertures, I set up a simple shoot and altered the aperture to see the results.

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