Photography Tutorial Notebook: Depth of Field

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Depth of Field

Pink Flower. Cinque Terra, Italy. June 16, 2011. Nikon Coolpix P500.

def: the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects in an image judged to be in acceptable focus. Photos in this category leave the surrounding photo soft so that the subject is in focus and stands out dramatically from its surroundings. This could mean a subject in focus in the foreground with a blurred background or a blured foreground and background some with an object in the back in focus.

Technique:
- This technique is achieved by con- trolling the f-stop of the lens, which is achieved by dividing the focal length of the lens by the aperture of the opening of the lens. Aperture is the opening in the lens that controls how much light enters the lens, very much like the iris of our eye. A wide open aperture results in a very shal- low range of focus, and a small aperture gives you lots of depth and puts almost everything in focus. So for depth of field photography, we want a wide open or larger aperture, which means we would want a smaller f-stop value.

-By getting really close to the image we can also control how sharp the background is. Most of the photos taken here were used with the macro lens, which allows the camera to focus closer to the subject and makes the background blurred, and very close physically to the subject.
- The distance between the subject and the background matters as well. For example a background that is farther away is easier to achieve the back- ground of depth of field photography.
- Larger film or sensors result in more out of focus in a photo than point-and- shoot photos where mostly everything is in focus.