D.O.F And How To Use It

Everybody will agree with me that in Photography -especially when it has to do with people photography- it is important for the picture to be in focus. But must everything in the picture be in focus? Clearly no!
In fact, playing with the point of focus is part of the story telling in photography. By laying the sharpness on one object in the picture and letting the other parts sink into “blur ness” the photographer can tell the viewer what he feels is important and what should be discovered on second views.
How to achieve a shallow depth of field?
The longer the focal length of the lens (for instance a tele zoom) you are using the shorter the depth of field will be. Which means the range of sharpness before and behind your point of focus will be smaller.
In addition to that you can open up your aperture. You can see the effect here in these beauty shots. One is taken with f10 and the other one with f5.6 (f stands for aperture).You can see here, that because of the small aperture of f10, the flower in the foreground is still quite sharp.
In the second picture, the focus is clearly on the eye of the model and the wider aperture of f5.6 and the longer focal length of the lens are helping to throw the flower more out of focus.
When to use these effects:
It totally depends on the photographer and the message he wants to get across in the picture. For landscape photography you usually want a wide range of sharpness. In portrait photography in contrary you often want the background to be blur, so your object of interest stands out.
Here a case that I had with a model. I wanted to photograph her in front of a busy dressing room. Here I photographed her with f11 and 1/100sec. The background is just too sharp and too busy and dominates the foreground. In short, the picture looks flat; so I opened my aperture and voila… the background loses focus, the model portrait is more definedand the picture looks more 3 dimensional.
This picture was now taken with f3.5 and1/100 sec. But of course, this was not the only thing I changed in order to get a better picture.
It also had to do something to my lighting and light setting. But we will discuss that one next week.
Na dann, gut Licht!
Your’s Yetunde
Yetundeform2@yahoo.com
www.camara-studios.com