Does the S30 Portrait Mode work?

[rogercruz]

Just bought this wonderful camera and I have been experimenting with it. Having used a 35mm SLR, I'm familiar with the portrait mode and the manual adjustment of the Av to blur the background. However, with the S30, I can't get the background to blur. I took pictures with the green portrait mode (all auto) and the background still sharp. I then tried manually changing the aperture from the min. to the max. value and the pictures come out identical. I would like to know if some other users out there have gotten this feature to work to determine if mine lens is not working properly.

Thanks in advance.
Roger

[Rustle]

To quote from Megapixel.net:

"...depth of field is more difficult to control with a compact digital camera than with earlier film cameras. The small imaging sensors of compact cameras require the use of short focal lengths, and this in turn gives these cameras an unusually long depth of field when compared to 35mm cameras. Thus, intentionally getting a shallow depth of field is more difficult."

http://www.megapixel.net/html/articles/article-dof.html

To that end, I've found that the Portrait and Av modes will blur if your subject is really close and the background is far away. Otherwise, there's just too much DOF for any camera with a small imaging sensor.

Russ

[rogercruz]

Russ, thanks for the pointer to the article. I was not fully aware of this limitation of digital cameras. I will do more experiments today following the suggestions mentioned in the article.

Roger

[rogercruz]

Well I performed my test today and I still can't get any blurring of the background no matter how hard I tried. I followed the recommendations from the article (ie, place background subjects away from main subject, use zoom, etc, etc) and no effect.

Is there any way to confirm that the iris on the lens is actually working, ie, being set to the specified stops?

Thanks.
Roger

[SteveCliff]

rogercruz wrote:

Is there any way to confirm that the iris on the lens is actually working, ie, being set to the specified stops?



Did you get any farther with this Roger ? I am having similar issues trying to get portrait shots 'correct' with my S40 ...