Posts Tagged ‘Depth of field’

Photographs are 2D captures of our 3D world. Yet we can still understand the form of items in photographs thanks to depth cues. In some cases, such as abstract and trick photography, it may actually be preferred to avoid anything in the photo that indicates depth.

Understanding the different depth cues that can be used in a photo can help you make stronger photos. When you know these cues you can ensure you include them to make an image more '3D', or ensure you don't include them for a flatter '2D' look.

Interchangeable Lens Cameras are often sold in kits containing a basic zoom lens. Because these lenses come with the camera as part of a kit, they are often referred to as 'kit lenses'.

The kit lens depends on the camera, but it is practically always a zoom. Often it is something like an 18-55mm for an APS-C camera, 24-100mm for a full frame camera, or 14-24mm for a m4/3 camera. These are all roughly equivalent.

The kit lens lets you go from wide-angle to short telephoto and everything in between. It's a good all-round general purpose lens.

Often you may read disparaging remarks about kit lenses. For sure, they're not the sharpest lenses around, and they don't have fast apertures for easily creating smooth and creamy out of focus backgrounds. But they're surprisingly useful and can give great results when you play to their strengths.

In this article we'll look at five relatively simple tips that you can apply to your photography to capture much better images.

However, none of these are quick 'magic' tips. They won't suddenly make you an amazing photographer. They all take time and practice. But if you put the work in you'll find a noticeable improvement in your photography.

Selective focus is a very useful technique for drawing the viewer's attention to a certain area of an image. Typically, though not always, the area you want to draw attention to will be the subject of the photo. By having the subject in sharp focus, but the rest of the image blurry, the eye is naturally drawn towards the sharp area of the image.

Selective focus can be achieved in-camera but can also be added to an image later using image editing software. In this article we'll look at both techniques.

In this article I'll cover five simple tips that you can implement to help you improve your photography skills and capture better photos. They are mostly things that are easy to implement, just we don't really think about them. Hopefully these tips will spur you on to really think when taking a photo, and so end up with a much more compelling shot.

When photographing certain subjects or scenes, we want all of the image in focus. This is often the case in product photography and landscape photography. We want sharpness from front to back with no area of the product or landscape out of focus.

This can be tricky to achieve, but there are a number of techniques that can be used to achieve a very large depth of field (the amount of the image in focus).

Bokeh is a word used to describe the out of focus areas of a photo. It does not really mean how out of focus an area is, but rather how the out of focus areas are rendered.

A Cup of Bokeh, please? by Shermeee on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

You will find that some people are very particular about bokeh, while others aren't really bothered. Just like one person might love a particular photo, while another person might think it is nothing special, the bokeh characteristics of a photo can be quite subjective.

Camera lens reviews, particularly those in Japan, now often include photos with out of focus areas particularly so that viewers can judge the bokeh.

When you take a photo of a landscape, it's not too difficult to get everything from a few feet in front of you all the way to the horizon in focus. But as you get closer to your subject and the magnification level increases, the depth of field (amount of the image in focus) rapidly drops off.

In macro and close-up photography, depth of field is so narrow it is usually measured in millimeters. So taking photos where more than just a thin sliver of the image is in focus can be tricky.

The depth of field in this image covers just a small part of the butterfly's mustache

We've all seen beautiful photos where the subject is in focus but the background is blurred. These sorts of photos may seem difficult to create. But with an understanding of depth of field, you can make photos like this too.

In this article we'll look how you can achieve a shallow depth of field to create photos with a blurred background.

The Aggressive Black Drongo! by VinothChandar on flickr (licensed CC-BY)

When taking a photo, you need to decide which part(s) of the photo you want to emphasize, and which parts you don't want to emphasize. The use of focus is a great way to achieve this.

Whatever is in focus in the photo will stand out much more than the areas that are of focus. In this article I'll share a few pointers on where to place the focus in your photos to really emphasize your subject.