Even though I’m the one who usually takes most of our family pictures (which also explains why I hardly ever appear in them), I can’t tell that I’ve ever been handy with a camera. If you don’t believe me, just ask my son Andrew. This is what he’ll probably have to say about my skills as a photographer.

Anyway, even when real life cameras can sometimes be quite frustrating for me, I must admit that I’m having lots of fun learning how to set cameras in PhotoWorks. Cameras allow you to obtain a viewpoint of your model that you could never achieve by zooming and panning alone.  They also allow you to add something called depth of field, which makes some of the objects in the scene (those nearer or further from the camera) appear out of focus. In the real world, depth of field is used in photography and films to direct your eye towards some part of the scene and create a mood.  It takes a bit of trial and error, but I find that depth of field, combined with the different lenses available in PhotoWorks, really helps make the rendering look a bit more real, by adding a sense of depth and perspective.

These are a few of my “experiments” with cameras. I put together an assembly with a couple of Lego men (modeled by Andy Rusho) and a Lego car (by Rigenbach Lionel) that I found at the 3D Content Central. For my first try, I aimed the camera to the face of one of the Lego men.  The following image shows the camera setting on the left side of the graphics area. What you see on the right side of the graphics area is the view you would have from the camera. The red spot is the area of the scene where I’m aiming the camera to; in this case, my aim is towards an edge of the head of the first Lego man, and it appears as Edge<1> under Target Point in the property manager. The three blue planes indicate my selections for depth of field. The darkest of the three is the area of the scene that will appear to be precisely in focus, and the planes in front and behind the darker one indicate the area of the scene in which objects will still appear to be in focus; outside of this area, objects will gradually become blurrier and blurrier as they get closer or further from the camera.  The beauty of this is that, without moving the camera at all, you can select different areas to be in focus in your scene, it doesn’t have to match the area where the camera is aimed at. In this case, the face of the first Lego man will be precisely in focus.

You can’t see the blurriness in the image until it’s rendered. This is the way it looks for my first experiment.

For my second experiment, the camera is still in the same place as before, and aiming at the same edge on the head of the same Lego man, but I changed my selection for depth of field and now it’s the face of the second Lego man that will be perfectly in focus.

Once rendered, we have the following. Notice how both the car and the first Lego man appear blurry.

For my last experiment, I wanted to see what it would look like from the driver’s seat.  Obtaining this kind viewpoint wouldn’t be possible just by zooming and rotating the model, but the camera makes it possible. I also added some depth of field, selecting the windshield as the object in the scene to be precisely in focus.

Here is the result as rendered.

The use of cameras and depth of field is explained beautifully in the PhotoWorks Step-by-Step Self Study Guide, so this blog post didn’t have the intention to show you how to do it, but rather to create some sort of awareness among those that have never tried this or didn’t even know it was possible, as well as to encourage the reader to explore all the different tools and options available in PhotoWorks. You may be amazed at what you’ll find!