Looking at your exif data I notice that you have a cybershot, I am afraid you probably wont be able to get any significant blur with your camera as it doesn't have aperture priority which is what creates depth of field, you can get the effect in an editing suite like gimp, photoshop or similar to do this you will have to create a duplicate layer and give this layer a "gaussian blur" (however blurry you want) then create a mask layer select a paintbrush tool and set the colour to black and while on the mask layer paint over the bits you dont want blurry if you make a mistake just set the paintbrush to white and paint over the mistake.
to increase the light and shadow you will probably need to use dodge and burn tool painting onto the picture with a dodge tool lightens the area while the burn tool darkens the area (best to start off with a low opacity and work up rather than jumping in with a full 100% dodge or burn. If this type of photography is what you are looking at getting into though I would seriously think about saving for a new camera one with aperture settings (f stops) as doing all that is a bit time consuming
Increasing / decreasing light cannot be done 'in camera' - your two options are
(i) physical intervention pre-capture (using reflectors / lights / shades), or
(ii) "dodge" and "burn" during post-processing.
The blur / focus of different parts is all to do with "depth of field" - broadly speaking objects that are the same distance from the camera will always have the same amount of blur. I.e. if you focus on something 5m away, everything else that's 5m away will also be in focus, but something 25m will be out of focus.
Depth of field is affected by focal length (i.e "zoom") and aperture setting at the time of capture. Again your two optons for selective blurring are
(i) physical moving around and changing zoom/aperture at point of capture, or
(ii) using software blur post-processing.
It is not generally possible to make out-of-focus things in-focus in software.
If you google "dodge and burn" and "depth of field" you might get some more pointers.
I always used manual mode. I can say that 90% of my work in most of my pictures are done with the camera settings and when I do use editing most of the time is to adjust the levels. I have to confess that somehow I find easier to figure out the settings of my camera than trying to use adobe.
The light can be the trickest part, but as a rule, coming from old school I rely in measuring the light with meter where there are dark or bright areas.
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to increase the light and shadow you will probably need to use dodge and burn tool painting onto the picture with a dodge tool lightens the area while the burn tool darkens the area (best to start off with a low opacity and work up rather than jumping in with a full 100% dodge or burn. If this type of photography is what you are looking at getting into though I would seriously think about saving for a new camera one with aperture settings (f stops) as doing all that is a bit time consuming
Increasing / decreasing light cannot be done 'in camera' - your two options are
(i) physical intervention pre-capture (using reflectors / lights / shades), or
(ii) "dodge" and "burn" during post-processing.
The blur / focus of different parts is all to do with "depth of field" - broadly speaking objects that are the same distance from the camera will always have the same amount of blur. I.e. if you focus on something 5m away, everything else that's 5m away will also be in focus, but something 25m will be out of focus.
Depth of field is affected by focal length (i.e "zoom") and aperture setting at the time of capture. Again your two optons for selective blurring are
(i) physical moving around and changing zoom/aperture at point of capture, or
(ii) using software blur post-processing.
It is not generally possible to make out-of-focus things in-focus in software.
If you google "dodge and burn" and "depth of field" you might get some more pointers.
Would it be better to use gimp or photoshop? I frankly have never used either.
The light can be the trickest part, but as a rule, coming from old school I rely in measuring the light with meter where there are dark or bright areas.