Actually there isn't an eye in the shot that's in focus. Use loop in your album to take a look.
Where was your focal point? Was your camera mounted or handheld?
All that said it's a nice shot.
I won't argue with that. I often take photos of puppies and they are always moving. Getting good focus is always a challenge. Lets just say Morgan's eyes are LESS in focus than the puppy's eyes. I usually use flexible spot focus and try to focus on a puppy eye. But in this shot, I need to be able to focus pretty much on any puppy and have enough depth of field to be sure to get everything in focus.
The DOF calculator is correct. The solution is to use a smaller aperture to get more DOF.
Yes.
That means that something else also needs to change if you want the same exposure value.
Sort of. While the statement is true, your next paragraph seems to indicate that when you said "exposure value" you actually meant image brightness. An exposure value is a number that indicates all possible combinations of aperture and shutter that will give the same exposure (amount of light hitting the sensor per unit area) from any given scene luminance. So if you narrow the aperture, the only thing that can (and must) change to give the same exposure value is the shutter speed. It must be slowed by the same number of stops the aperture was narrowed.
The smaller aperture reduces the lens's ability to capture enough light quickly, so you need to either increase the sensor's ability to capture light by raising the ISO
No. Raising the ISO does not increase the sensor's ability to capture light. The sensor's ability to capture light is fixed, regardless of ISO setting. All increasing ISO does is increase the brightness of an image produced from any given exposure, while possibly slightly
reducing the effect of noise added by the camera. If you reduce the exposure by narrowing the aperture while leaving shutter and scene luminance unchanged, then raising ISO by the same number of stops as you narrowed the aperture will produce an image of the same brightness, but made with less light. Because it was made with less light, it will be noisier.
or give the lens/sensure more time to work by decreasing the shutter speed. Or both.
OP
also had the option of increasing the scene luminance by increasing the power of his flash. By increasing the power, he can reduce his exposure value (by narrowing aperture) while maintaining the same exposure. That's because exposure is determined by the combination of aperture, shutter and scene luminance. *
Photography is all about balancing those three factors in such a way that they produce the result you want.
Well, actually there are
four factors to consider: scene luminance, aperture, shutter and ISO. The first three determine the exposure. For a given camera, exposure determines the shot noise. Exposure plus ISO determine the image brightness.
Which results you care about determines which of the
four factors you need to balance. If you care about image brightness but don't care about noise, then you can balance exposure against ISO. If you also care about noise, then you need to balance the three parameters of exposure (aperture, shutter and scene luminance).
*It should be noted that doubling the flash power only doubles the scene luminance when the flash is the only source of light in the scene. That does not appear to be the case in this instance. Therefore doubling the flash power in this case will not double the scene luminance, so doubling flash power will not be sufficient to balance a one stop narrowing of aperture. Since shutter is about as slow as one would want with wiggling puppies as a subject, increasing flash and ISO would appear to be the best choice.
