This assignment will get you familiar with thinking about and using the following three technical controls: Depth of Field, Motion and Perspective.

This is the area in your picture, from front to back, that is sharply in focus. Shallow depth of field is when only a small portion of your picture is in focus; deep depth of field is when everything in your picture is in focus. Depth of field is mainly controlled by the aperture setting on your camera (the aperture is the opening that lets light through to your film) -- a wide aperture (a small number, such as 2) produces less depth of field, while a smaller aperture (a large number, such as 22) produces greater depth of field. Depth of field can also be controlled by your proximity to the subject (the closer you are, the shallower the depth of field) and the focal length of your lens (the longer the focal length, the shallower the depth of field). You can fiddle with the depth of field for the technical mastery of it, or (even better) you can find ways to incorporate depth of field into your composition, where the subject and the depth of field are used to complement each other.

There are various ways of showing motion in your pictures. Your shutter speed is going to be a deciding factor for a lot of it. You can get a blur with a moving object and a longer shutter speed (car head and tail lights on a rainy night are especially beautiful); or you can freeze motion with a short shutter speed, and also with a flash (sports, dance, etc.). You can also try something funky called panning, which is when you follow the movement of your subject with your lens. The result, when done correctly, is a picture where the background is blurred and the subject is in focus -- try bicyclists and cars. Zoom bursts are another instance where motion is conveyed. If you have a zoom lens, try taking an exposure of around a second or two, and zoom the lens all the way out during the exposure. When done correctly, the subject will be more or less sharp in the center, with radiating streaks emanating from it. Again, this can be done for the technical mastery of the technique, or it can be used in conjunction with your composition to achieve a specific goal (for instance, a golfer in the middle of a shot, hence giving the impression that the golf club is shattering the image).

Perspective can help give your photographs the illusion of being three dimensional. You can play with different types of lenses (for example, fisheyes) and with different focal lengths (this is the distance between the lens and the film when your camera is focused on infinity, the farthest distance on your lens) to achieve different perspectives. You can also change the angle that you're shooting from, and change the composition of your shot. Try playing with linear perspective (such as a road receding to a dot in the distance), diminishing size (objects getting smaller as they recede, such as fence posts), aerial perspective (when subjects at a distance appear more monochromatic and fuzzy due to atmospheric haze, hence heightening the perceived distance between viewer and subject), overlapping forms (when an object in the foreground obscures objects in the background, helping create the idea of depth) and depth of field (shallower depth of field works in much the same way as overlapping forms, with the in-focus object obscuring an already obscured background, again creating the idea of depth).