Five finger exercises

Five finger exercises

Wikipedia says that a five finger exercise is a musical piece for the piano that requires the pianist to use all the fingers of each hand, and that this helps improve dexterity. In other words, the point of the music is not that it sounds wonderful, but that you emerge from learning and playing it as a better pianist.

And this blog is about a photographic five finger exercise. The pictures won’t be great, but you will emerge from half an hour playing with the ideas here with a better intuitive grasp of your camera’s controls, and the start of an understanding of depth of field.



You need a wall built of bricks, or a pavement with slabs or blocks. Or maybe a wooden fence, or a hedge. Anything that goes from very close to you to at least thirty feet away will do, providing it has some detail or texture.

Before you venture out into the rain, make sure that you know which buttons to press and which wheels to rotate to change aperture, and find out how to change the single focus spot that the camera uses. Using a touchscreen for altering aperture is cheating, for the purposes of what you are doing.

Set the focus point as far as you can get it to one side of the frame, the zoom to its widest setting and the mode to Aperture priority. Stand close to your wall, or pavement, and open the aperture to maximum. Remember, no touch screen! And take your first picture. You should find that the subject near you is sharp, and as the distance increases, things get gently blurrier.



Now stop down the aperture to f/16 (still no touch screen), and repeat the exercise. You will find that the fading of sharpness is slower, and distant objects are more recognisable.

Repeat this pair of frames with the zoom set to the longest focal length – you will probably find that the widest aperture is smaller than for part one. Don’t worry – again, maximum aperture and f/16.
If you want to practice some more, try a whole range of different apertures at each focal length, and different focal length settings. This will show you precisely how the depth of field varies with focal length and aperture: having this in your head is much more use than carrying a depth of field table or an app on your mobile.

Please tell me if this is helpful by adding a comment below, and maybe a picture. I’m sure you can find a prettier wall than mine…