What Is Depth of Field?

What is depth of field?

Depth of field is also called DOF. The term depth of field is used in photography to describe the sharp part of a photo. A large depth of field means the entire photo is sharp. But what exactly is depth of field and how do you use it? Time to focus on this subject.

Depth of field?

Imagine you have a vegetable garden and you want to photograph a tomato. It has just rained and droplets of water are still beautifully resting on it. Time for a photo. The water droplets on the tomato are nicely in focus, while the rest of the tomatoes hanging on the same vine are blurry. The sharpest part you see in your photo is called depth of field. Simply put, depth of field is the area that is sharp from a nearby point to a distant point. So it is not true that only the point you focused on is sharp in your photo. There is also an area in front of and behind it. How large that area is depends on a number of factors: aperture, focal length, and distance. These factors influence how we experience depth of field.

Back to the tomato. Because only a small part is sharp, in this case the tomato, we call this a shallow depth of field. Now we take the same tomato and place it in a greenhouse full of tomato plants. You don’t want to show just part of the space, but the entire greenhouse. This is called a large depth of field. Everything from front to back is displayed sharply.

This is why a large depth of field is often seen in landscape photography and architectural photography. You want to see everything in your photo. A shallow depth of field is more commonly found in portrait or macro photography.

Why depth of field?

When looking at a photo, your eyes always go to the sharpest part first. You cannot help this; it happens automatically. By playing with depth of field, you can guide the viewer. You can show the viewer what you find important or, in other words, what you want to tell with the photo.

Playing with aperture and depth of field

Let’s briefly return to the importance of aperture, focal length, and the distance to the subject. After that, you can calmly start experimenting yourself. The aperture is the opening of the lens. Inside this opening are multiple blades that slide over each other. This allows us to make the opening larger or smaller. It is important to remember that the smaller the opening, the larger the area of sharpness becomes. So if you have a large lens opening, you get a shallow depth of field. Aperture goes much further than this, but for depth of field this is the most important thing you need to know right now.

Focal length and distance are actually connected. We usually combine those two words as focal distance. What we do with focal distance is look at the distance from the photographer to the subject and based on that choose the focal length. The focal point is the point where all the light comes together on your camera sensor. You can also read the focal length on the lens itself. You recognize it by the number of millimeters on the lens. The focal length determines how much you see in your photos and how large the subject appears in the frame. We can choose ourselves how much we want to show.

What is bokeh?

You have probably come across the word bokeh before. Bokeh comes from the Japanese word “boke” and means blur. When we talk about bokeh, we are actually talking about the quality of the blur in your photo. By quality, we mean the way round shapes and colors blend together. Bokeh only occurs with a shallow depth of field.