Depth of Field

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Depth of field

Easy to understand but difficult to comprehend!

It is the distance in a photograph from foreground to background that is in focus. Now that was easy wasn’t it. Controlling it is a little more difficult to explain.

Look at the stones on the pavement in the photo above image, it's easy to see the depth of field of what I would guess around 5 ft.

Depth of field is controlled by the aperture setting on the lens, as we close down the aperture the more depth of field we obtain, as we open the aperture the less depth we obtain, So this is where a good quality low aperture lens allows us to be more creative.

An easy way to allow yourself to control the aperture is to use the Av (aperture priority) mode on your camera. This will compensate automatically the exposure by changing the shutter speed.

The picture below left was taken at full aperture of 1.8 on a 200mm lens. As you can see the only thing in focus is the central man giving a powerful image, the same image with a lot of depth of field would not be very dynamic.

The photo above right is of a golf trick shot artist, the whole image should be sharp and would have been taken at around f11. with a 18mm lens

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