Set your camera on Aperture Priority and run the full range. If you need to, use a tripod to steady the camera. I could have used a tripod or increased my ISO to give me a bit more shutter speed room. So DO go try this at home.
Try it with something close to the background, then far away. Try it with a 12mm lens, 50mm lens, then a mm and see what happens. Share your results in the comments section and please share this article using the social media links below if you enjoyed it.
Darlene is an educator who teaches aspiring amateurs and hobbyists how to improve their skills through her articles here on Digital Photo Mentor, her beginner photography course , and private tutoring lessons. To help you at whatever level you're at she has two email mini-courses. Sign up for her free beginner OR portrait photography email mini-course.
Or get both, no charge! If it's a landscape, 'all' is most likely your answer, but for portraits and wildlife, you might prefer to lose a distracting background. Either way, what you're doing is playing around with depth of field. Depth of field is the zone of acceptable sharpness around the point you choose to focus your image — how sharp or blurred are the areas behind and in front of your subject. With shallow depth of field, only a narrow section of the image looks sharp and everything else is blurred, while wide depth of field keeps everything in the picture acceptably sharp from front to back.
You control the depth of field by altering the lens aperture. There are a few other parts to the equation. One is your camera's sensor — an FX full-frame sensor will give you a shallower depth of field than a DX sensor at any given aperture.
Another is how close you are to your subject. But the key thing to remember is that the lower your f-number, the less depth of field and the blurrier the background; the higher the f-number, the greater the depth of field and therefore the sharper the background. Depth of field is the zone within a photo that appears sharp and in focus.
In every picture, there is a point of focus where you actually focus your lens. But there is also an area both in front of , and behind , your point of focus that also appears sharp — and that area corresponds to the depth of field.
The sharp zone will vary from photo to photo depending on different factors, such as aperture and distance to the subject discussed in more detail below. So by adjusting your camera settings and your composition, you can determine the amount of your image that turns out sharp and the amount of your image that ends up blurry. Images that are sharp from front to back are said to have a deep depth of field.
A deep depth of field is popular in landscape photography, where you often want to show every little detail from the scene.
On the other hand, some images have very small zones of focus, known as shallow depth of field. Shallow depth of field photos are immediately noticeable because the subject will remain tack-sharp, while the background renders as a smooth, creamy blur:.
This effect is especially popular in portraiture; photographers use it to draw attention to their subject while preventing background distractions. And you can also find shallow DoF street photography, photojournalistic photography, and even landscape photography. Looking for more depth of field examples? Whether your image has a shallow depth of field or a deep depth of field can make a huge difference and can often make or break the composition.
By understanding these variables and how they work, you can produce a deep or shallow depth of field at will. The smallest f-numbers correspond to the widest apertures and therefore the shallowest depth of fields. And the larger f-numbers correspond to the narrowest apertures and therefore the deepest depth of fields.
Now, adjusting the aperture f-stop of your lens is the simplest way to control your depth of field while setting up your shot. So if you get up-close and personal when photographing a flower, the depth of field will shrink. Shooting macro photography with the reverse lens technique can become an addiction: abstraction to create art. In this case, I was able to reach a rate of magnification of using a Cosina wide-angle with a lens reversing ring.
Of course, these are just a few examples of depth of field practical use. Feel free to apply it to any type of photography and situation you desire Just be as much creative as possible! Due to the fact that a camera can precisely focus the lens at only one distance at a time, sharpness gradually decreases on each side of the focused distance or, if you prefer, the plane of focus PoF.
The distance between the camera and the first element that is considered to be acceptably sharp is called DoF near limit. Similarly, the distance between the camera and the furthest element that is considered to be acceptably sharp is called DoF far limit. Notice that the limits of depth of field are not hard boundaries between sharp and unsharp since defocus is produced gradually.
Depth of field is not equally distributed in front near and behind far your focus point. Usually, the far DoF is larger than the near DoF. On the contrary, the furthest you focus the less evenly distributed.
In similar fashion, for a given focus distance, a telephoto lens will give you a more evenly distributed DoF than a wide angle lens.
Depending on the settings used for the shot, the area that is considered to be acceptably sharp in your image can go from less than a millimeter Macro Photography to kilometers, and even to infinity Landscape or Astrophotography. This last infinite depth of field situation occurs when you focus the lens at what is called the hyperfocal distance or at any distance larger than the hyperfocal distance.
There is a DoF fact to which I specially want you to pay attention. Have a look at the following portrait. This work goes far beyond any historical moment, any geographical spot and any role that has been attributed to women by society.
The viewer is lead through a visual intimate path to finally discover the deepest emotions that dwell in our women. This picture represents the beginning of a terrible disease: cancer.
It immortalizes the very first moment Maria, now totally recovered, looked at her falling hair and realized that her life would turn into a real nightmare. She was suffering but also pulling all her strength and energy to fight back the disease.
At the same time I wanted the body, where her cancer was growing, completely out of focus. How did I take it? First, I used a subject distance focus distance of 4. Then, I asked Maria to separate her hands from the body. So go, move around and find the right shooting position. The right spot is where everything makes sense and where all the elements you need come together in a superb image.
The aperture is the setting that beginners typically use to control depth of field. PhotoPills includes a depth of field chart and an advanced DoF calculator where you can change these hypothesis to adjust the circle of confusion you need.
In other words, when the lens is focused at the hyperfocal distance, everything that falls at any given distance from half of this distance out to infinity will be acceptably sharp, which is the maximum depth of field you can have.
Notice that if you focus at a distance that is shorter than the hyperfocal distance, the depth of field far limit will not be at infinite. This will result into blurring the elements at the horizon or furthest background elements like mountains or stars.
In practice, as I explain in the article " How to shoot truly contagious Milky Way pictures ", focusing exactly at the hyperfocal distance is very difficult.
Actually, not much larger, one foot 30cm will do the job. For example, in night photography, if you focus at a shorter distance than the hyperfocal, the depth of field far limit will not be at infinite, which will blur the stars. By focusing at a slightly larger distance, the depth of field near limit will be a bit further from the camera, but the stars will be perfectly in focus.
By having a quick look at the hyperfocal distance table we can conclude that:. One of the questions I get the most when shooting the Milky Way with my students is:.
The hyperfocal distance for my shot is 7. What am I doing wrong? Plug the numbers in the DoF calculator to get the following results:. In this case, when focusing at 7. Anything beyond this distance will appear to be out of focus in the photo. On the contrary, if you focus the lens at a distance slightly longer than the hyperfocal distance 8. Have a look at the following video where you can see me focusing at the hyperfocal distance, step by step.
To shoot it, I used the DoF calculator to figure out the hyperfocal distance, which resulted to be 4. Finally, I set back the camera to manual focus, pointed and shot. Like the imaginary monster that is used to frighten children, the CoC has no specific form or shape, and the idea of it varies dramatically from photographer to photographer.
The truth is that there is no reason to fear the circle of confusion. Therefore, as you are going through your depth of field calculations, you need to know and use the diameter of the circle of confusion together with the other shooting settings that affect DoF aperture, focal length and focus distance. In general, these assumptions work pretty well.
But if you need to change them print size, viewing distance and visual acuity , use an adjusted value of the circle of confusion CoC when doing your DoF calculations. The typical example is when you want to print an image in large format. Let me give you a different example. Now, go to a gallery in your town and stand in front of any of the paintings.
When you look at it from a certain distance, the painting appears to be in sharp focus. But, as you get closer, the image turns blurry. Imagine that the diameter of the blur spots forming the painting is 0. Walk away from the painting. Then, I can confirm that, for this given viewing conditions viewing distance 16ft, painting size and your visual acuity , the circle of confusion of the painting is 0. Therefore, if you want to see the painting in sharp focus from a closer distance, you need the traces or blur spots forming it to be smaller.
This means that the acceptable circle of confusion needs to be smaller too. In photography, the blur spots you see in the image are an enlargement of the blur spots captured by the sensor of the camera. This enlargement is given by the proportion between the sensor size and the final image size print size. You know that only at the focus distance, a point object will be reproduced as a point image on the sensor.
And, as you move away from the plane of focus, any point object will be defocused, producing a blur spot in the image. On the contrary, when this blur spot surpases a certain size, it appears to be out of focus to us.
This point in focus is commonly known as the acceptable circle of confusion, or simply the circle of confusion CoC. Anything larger would be seen as a small circle, not as a point, and would be therefore perceived as out of focus.
Of course, talking about circles is a simplification. In reality, the circle of confusion is not a circle. It has the same shape as the lens aperture, normally rendered as a polygonal shape.
To keep things simple it is typically assumed to be circular, which is accurate when it is very small. Camera manufacturers assume the diameter of the circle of confusion to be 0. Thus, the better visual acuity you have the smaller the circle of confusion should be. On the contrary, when print size image enlargement compared with the camera sensor increases, the circle of confusion needs to be smaller in order to keep the image perceived as sharp.
In conclusion, the circle of confusion is just a variable used to reach consensus on how much a point needs to be blurred in order to be perceived as unsharp for a given camera sensor and viewing conditions print size, viewing distance and visual acuity. How do you calculate the circle of confusion? What about giving her a large format picture of her favourite landscape as birthday present? You know that she loves a little hut in the bay of Fornells Menorca.
A print size of 2. This means that you need the fisherman and the hut to be in focus. So you must use this specific CoC or a smaller one when doing your depth of field calculations. Now, let me use PhotoPills ' Advanced Depth of Field calculator to figure out the total depth of field. Introducing also a circle of confusion of 0. Using the wrong CoC can lead you to have a blurry image when printed.
How does the circle of confusion affect depth of field? Have a look at the following numbers. How far will people be viewing it from? Many photographers use the aperture to get the desired depth of field because it can be easily controlled by simply changing the aperture. Subject distance focus distance and focal length are more influenced by the image composition choice. This increases the distance between the last two points that are considered to be acceptable sharp in front and behind the plane of focus, thus, allowing you to get a deeper depth of field.
Take a look at the following two images shot with a full frame camera Nikon D4s in this case. Focus distance is kept constant at 8. Notice how depth of field increases as aperture decreases. Similarly, the following animated gif shows how depth of field increases when aperture is progressively decreased, while camera type Nikon D4s , focus distance 8. Notice that, for a given focus distance, the percentage of depth of field in front of the focus point decreases and increases behind it as you close the aperture.
Since using small apertures increases depth of field, one of the most common questions I get in my classes and workshops is:. The first limitation is the exposure triangle. While you choose the aperture, you also need to take into account shutter speed and ISO in order to get a photo correctly exposed.
Small apertures reduce the amount of light collected by the sensor. Consequently, you need to reduce shutter speed select a longer exposure time to maintain a consistent exposure, forcing you to use a tripod to prevent motion blur.
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