Depth of field technique page

Depth of field is a term used to discuss the depth that a picture has, whether there is a lot of background in focus or not would be the simple way of describing it.  I will split this into two sections, how to shoot a shallow depth of field and how to shoot a deep depth of field.

Shallow;

Firstly to get a nice picture with a shallow depth of field we must place our subject in front of a background that will look nice when out of focus, however you must be a distance away from it or it will stay in focus. Before shooting our camera must be set up correctly so that we get the best results, we must change both the aperture and the zoom length. We want to set the aperture to as low a number as we can, so the depth of field is much shallower.  Then we need to go on and choose a zoom length that will make our subject in focus and our background out of focus, therefore we must set this at around the number 28/100/300, depending on the focal length you choose will mean how far away or close to your subject you will be standing, then we are ready to shoot, for my work I used a focal length of 300 because I wasn’t far away enough from my subject that I could get a nice balance between the background and them. You will then have a picture with a shallow depth of field; I found that portraits worked very well for this, as can be seen in my work elsewhere on the blog.

Deep;

Firstly for a deep depth of field photograph you need to choose what you want to shoot, and you must carefully think about the background because it will be very clear in these pictures, you want something where there is background that is far away so it looks deep also though. We will then need to change the settings on the camera again like with the shallow depth of field, however the aperture that we want for this type of photograph means that we want a higher number so the aperture is actually smaller. To add to this we want a wide angle to make the picture have more depth so a focal length of around 28 is the best to use as it gives you more to work with. You then just need to go out and shoot, with having a deep depth of field it is good to have layers in a picture so that it adds to the effect. If you follow all of this you will end up with a photograph with a deep depth of field.