F-Stop the Madness!

So . . . we learned all about F-stops in class last week, and our photography homework was to take a series of outdoor pictures of three objects roughly 10 feet apart, with nothing changing in the shots except the F-stop setting.

Honestly, it was kind of boring. I had the idea of using pumpkins, but we didn't get a sunny day until after Halloween and by then there wasn't a pumpkin to be had. So then I tried using three different recycle bins, sitting them on the deck, but I didn't like the way the pictures turned out. Finally I settled on using three plastic adirondack chairs in the back yard.

The idea of the different shots was to show the blur of the background. The lower the F-stop, the more the background blurs. This is the shot using the lowest setting on my camera, F-5.6:

And this is the shot using the highest setting:

While the second picture wins for clarity, to be honest I couldn't see much difference in the pictures in between. Frankly, I found it a little disappointing.