One of the greatest benefits in moving from a compact digital point-and-shoot camera to a DSLR is the increase in flexibility you have over depth of field. Depth of field, or DOF, is a measure of how much of a scene is in focus in an image. Sometimes, you want as much of the scene to be in focus as possible, but there are many times when you want to direct the viewer’s attention to the subject, and leave the background as a nice, non-distracting blur. DSLRs give you far more ability to control DOF than a compact point-and-shoot.

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I’ve been taking pictures for much of my life. When I was a kid, I got a cheap 110 film camera for Christmas. Like many 110 cameras, it was little more than a plastic toy, but it was something my brother and I put to good use for many years. When I was older, I got a point-and-shoot Nikon 35mm camera, which I also enjoyed. But it wasn’t until I took an introductory photography course in college that I really got into it. I used a Pentax 35mm SLR and shot black-and-white film, doing all of the developing and enlarging the old-fashioned way. It was the very first class I ever took in college (8 AM Monday morning!) and it became my favorite, combining technical know-how with artistic sensibilities.

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