Depth of Field

Depth of field or DOF, is a term used to specify the area of a scene that is in focus. A “shallow depth of field” has the subject sharp in focus, but the rest of the foreground and background is out of focus. The background and foreground appear soft. This is a great technique for getting your subject to stand out from the background. Take a look at this picture. You can see how I’ve made the background flowers out of focus so that subject flower stands out more.

Here is an example of where I didn’t do a great job separating the subject from background. I wanted just the first tulip to be the center of focus, but all the background is in focus too, and it’s distracting:

There are three things the affect the size of your Depth of Field: Focal length, aperture, and distance from the subject. I will go into the technique more later, but to summarize:

• Focal Length: The more zoom, the shallower the DOF
• Aperture: The wider the aperture (small F-Number) , the shallower the DOF
• Distance from subject: the closer to the subject, shallower the DOF.