Been trying to get familiar with my new camera and playing with the manual settings and software to manipulate raw images. Now started using iso 100 aetting to try and get finer images. Cant upload better quality tiffs with imageshack as they are too big so here are the lesser quality jpegs. Love close up detailed photos although finding it difficult getting the depth of field right.
For a crisp foreground with really shallow DoF you need to have the aperture open as wide as possible (smallest f-stop you`re particular lens will go to), and don`t be tempted to get too close to the subject. The lowest you`ll probably see on a standard kit lens or zoom will be f4.5/f5.6. Pretty good, but if you want really good shallow DoF pics, especially portriats/close-ups then a 50mm f1.8 lens is very affordable (under 100), and gives cracking results.
Exactly what Stu says - try the 50mm F1.8 and you'll get cracking results with the wide aperture. You'll never want to use a slow lens ever again. BTW - your pics are taking forever to load (at least, they are for me). Even if they are low-res files, the size is still huge. Try 'saving for web or device' under file menu in Photoshop and saving them at less than 1000 pixels wide. They'll still look good on screen and you can keep the hi-res ones for printing. Your pictures are looking promising, when they eventually load
