Capturing life's moments in lens and pen
What is Shallow Depth of Field? In simple terms, it’s throwing most of your image out of focus while keeping the main subject in your image perfectly sharp. It’s often used in portrait photography:
My little monkey discovers he has feet! Notice how his feet are perfectly in focus and sharp, while his face looks slightly blurry.
Here, the subject's eyes are sharp but the shallow depth of field blurs the rest.
To try a shallow depth of field shot, change your f-stop number to the lowest number your camera will allow. **To find out how to change your aperture (what is aperture?) or f-stop number, check your manual! For best results, keep your subject pretty close to you, and be sure fill the image with objects of varying distances from you and your subject.
You can use Shallow Depth of Field creatively to help draw attention to a subject, as in the portraits above. You can also use it to make unexpected images, like this one:
Typically, we expect landscape and nature image to feature lots of detail and be in focus throughout. But by using a shallow depth of field, we can create a very different image. Notice how the points of light on the puddle in the background turn into a round shape with a shallow depth of field. This is called a bokeh effect.
Stay tuned for the next photo school, where I’ll feature the yin to this artistic yang: Great Depth of Field.
[...] Wondering what effects the opposite of Great Depth of Field will have? Check out the last photo school post: Shallow Depth of Field. [...]