Depth of focus

One of the things I like doing with our cheap Sony point-and-click camera is trying to convince it to take pictures where the subject is nicely in focus, and either foreground or background details are out of focus. An art teacher at my school referred to this as depth of focus once, and the term has stuck with me whether it's right or not. I would quite like to win a fancy camera one day in a competition - I don't feel I can justify the expense or would use one often enough to be bothered buying one, but it'd be neat to have a digital slr camera with a couple of lenses to play with :-)

Here's a shot I took of Dominic recently with the aforementioned focus thingy I like - achieved by pointing the camera at Dom, depressing the take-a-photo button half way to lock the focus then moving to a position the same distance from Dominic, but with something interesting between us. I quite like this one: