How can I get parts of my photos to be sharp, and others to be blurry?

I think it has something to do with aperture, but I'm not sure. I currently have an HP photosmart R927. It has a "MF"/"Manual Focus" option, but I'm not really sure what it means. What tool am I supposed to use to do this to my pictures? How am I supposed to choose my focus points? Is there a way to have several points of focus?





I'll try to make this simple. Say I had a picture of a flower and I wanted the flower to be sharp, and the background blurry. Or, a field of flowers, and out of the field, I only wanted two flowers to be in focus. In both cases...er, well, what do I do?





And I side question; What exactly is aperture?

How can I get parts of my photos to be sharp, and others to be blurry?
It's going to be darn hard to "de-focus" too much using your R927 digital camera while keeping the main subject in sharp focus. The smaller the sensor, the greater depth of field you will have. Generally speaking, the smaller the camera, the smaller the sensor. Most of the pictures you take with a digital camera are quite sharp from near to far distances and there is a reason for that which I will explain.





While we speak in terms of the 35 mm equivalency of digital lenses, don't forget that the digital sensors are usually smaller than a full-format 35 mm frame. Most of the more popular point and shoot cameras have the smaller sensors. It's only about 5 mm wide and 4 mm high. Yours has a bigger sensor (which is an advantage for this topic) and it is 7.2 mm x 5.3 mm in size. The lens on required to cover that angle of view is an ACTUAL 7-22 mm zoom lens. At these focal lengths, the background is going to almost always be in pretty sharp focus. In other words, if you WANT to defocus the background, you are going to have to work pretty hard at it. You would have to zoom to the longer end of the lens and set the aperture open as wide as it will go, if your camera even allows you to control the aperture, and get pretty close to your main subject while having the background a fair distance away.





Go here and see the effect that you are looking for.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstei...


You will notice that the ones that show this the best are taken with a digital SLR, which has a huge sensor compared to your camera.





There are two, though, http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstei... and http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstei... that have a fuzzy background. In the pink rose, it's not all that fuzzy, but this was achieved by using the macro setting. In the yellow rose, it's pretty fuzzy. This is because the rose is in focus and the background is actually about 10 feet behind the flower. Try those strategies and see how it goes.





[Note - oddly, these are both taken with the widest wide angle on my camera, but we still get some fuzziness. It would have been much greater if I used a longer focal length. I just don't have any samples on-line right now.]





I am trying to include a link to Wikipedia for an article on Depth of Field, but Yahoo! keeps rejecting my posting. They do a good job explaining this, so go there yourself and look up the article. I'm sorry that I can't post it...
Reply:Thanks. I'll try again: Wikipedia does pretty well on the subject of depth of field. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... Report Abuse

Reply:You must be very close to the subject (as close as your camera will allow ...usually 3 feet)and have the background items at least 5 feet behind...that's it.And no you cant blur certain objects with your camera and then not blur others unless you have a photo editing program such as any version of adobe photoshop.
Reply:dont do whats above photoshop has nothing to do with it!





Read Mr Aces answer!





all i will add is use manual focus and you are on to it its all in the camera! use the appeture, try F2.8 to F4, a tripod will help alot





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Reply:Aperture is the ratio of the length of the lens to the opening in which the light enters the lens.





The aperture effects the apparent sharpness of the image.





When you are focused at ten feet at the most open aperture everything ten feet from the camera will be in focus





As you reduce the aperture size (stop down) to a smaller size, the apparent sharpness begins to grow. Two thirds behind the focus point and on third in front of the focus point.





Eventually when you get to the smallest aperture, the whole scene will appear to be in focus.





Many times pro and art photographers adjust the aperture to control the apparent focus range (depth of field) and shoot at what ever shutter speed is necessary to get a good exposure at the preferred aperture. Many times this will mean using a tripod and even exposures as long as 30 seconds.

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