concepts for lighting and digital photography

concepts for lighting and digital photography

Using depth of field gives you complete control over your creativity as you progress along your photographic journey to great images. It’s easy to put into practise once you understand a few basic concepts and then great photos are yours. Here’s how it works.

If you have any experience in photography then you’ve probably heard about depth of field and attempted to put it into practise. This part of photography can seem to be a little daunting but really it’s a numbers game, pardon the pun.

It has everything to do with the aperture settings or f-numbers on your camera. Knowing which f-number or f-stop to use is critical to understanding depth of field. It doesn’t have to be daunting if your have read your manual and know just how to change these settings. It all boils down to getting to know your camera. If you can’t use your creative tool then you aren’t going to get anywhere with your photography.

What is depth of field? A clue to it is the word depth. Basically it’s how deep the area of focus of an image extends before and beyond your subject or point of focus. Take for example a landscape scene. The area of focus extends from almost in front of you right through to the mountains in the distance, or infinity. That’s a very large depth of field. The photographer probably focused somewhere in the middle of the scene. You’ll use apertures or f-numbers of f22 or f32.

But, other images seem to just have the subject in focus with everything else blurred out. Usually this is used with a portrait photo. Sometimes even parts of the person’s face are slightly out of focus. This is especially so with nature photography. A photo of an insect seems to be mostly out of focus with just, for example, the spiders eight eyes sharply in focus. In these images the actual depth of field is only millimetres wide. You’ll use apertures or f-numbers of f2.8 or f4.

Why do photographers do this? Shouldn’t the whole image be perfectly in focus? The reason is that a narrow depth of field helps the subject stand out. It stops the clutter and confusion of a busy background from competing with the subject.

So now you know what depth of field looks like, but, how can you achieve this? What settings need to be used to create these types of images? Really it’s quite simple. If you want a small or narrow depth of field use the small aperture numbers or f-stops, e.g. f-2.8. If you want a very large or wide depth of field then use the large aperture numbers, e.g. f22 or f32.

These usually range from f1.2 and f2.8 right up to f64 depending on the quality of camera or lens. Most point n shoots range from f2.8 up to f8 or f11. With digital SLRs it is totally dependent on the lens and its quality. An expensive lens will start at about f2.8 and a budget lens from about f5.6. To get a really narrow depth of field you would need a minimum aperture of f2.8 or below.

The classic example of good depth of field is of a beautiful flower. A very narrow depth of field results in a blurring of the background and lifts the colourful flower off the background. This allows a framing effect as the colour contrasts with the green background. Unfortunately this effect is only seen with cameras or lenses that have very wide apertures or small f-numbers e.g. f-2.8.

There is a point that will help with those who don’t have such a wide aperture. Make sure that there is plenty of distance between the subject and its background as this will help increase the blurring effect.

The key to really great images is the intelligent use of depth of field. This is one key you need to get you head around if you want to get creative with your images. If you can’t, there is an easier way to do this without the numbers. Most digital cameras have a programme dial with little icons like a head, a mountain or a flower. These have been preprogrammed to give the correct depth of field. The head icon changes the aperture so that depth of field is automatically set for you when taking a portrait shot of someone. This gives you that narrow depth of field and a blurred background. The mountain icon will do the opposite and give a wide depth of field that can be used for taking a landscape shot with most of scene in crisp focus.

Don’t be afraid to manually change your aperture so that you can determine how much depth of field you want for a particular shot. It’s all in experimenting and practise. Happy shooting!

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