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Depth Of Field - How To Use It Properly

Being able to understand and alter depth of field is a key skill to becoming a great professional photographer. A firm grasp on this concept can improve the quality of your work and can provide you with countless alternative ways to shoot one subject. Although depth of field may seem confusing, with a little practice it will quickly become second nature.

Depth of Field Defined

One way to think of depth of field is how "deep" the focus goes in a picture. In more simple terms, the depth of field refers to the difference between the items in the background losing clarity compared to the subject in focus. Depth of field can really be thought of as the relationship between blurry elements and focused subjects in your picture.

If you want an example of a picture with a low depth of field, imagine a picture of a flower that has the entire background blurry with the flower in focus. And on the flip side, an example of a high depth of field is a landscape photo with subjects both up close and far away clearly in focus.  In either of those examples, changing the depth of field would have a dramatic impact on what the viewer experiences when looking at the final framed photograph.

What Controls Depth of Field?

The primary influence on the depth of field of any particular image is the length of its exposure. The longer a frame of film or digital sensor has to absorb the scene it is being exposed to, the greater amount of detail it will be able to accurately reproduce. Any time you have longer exposure times, you'll always have a greater depth of field in your image.

In terms of manipulation, you can control the depth of field of any image directly by forcing the exposure time to either speed up or slow down. You can do this by changing the shutter speed of your camera; slow speeds (60 and lower) will cause longer exposures and greater depth, while fast speeds (125 and higher) will decrease exposure times and cause the opposite.

Tips for Working with Depth of Field

Although you can intentionally make your images have greater depth of field, this will require you to adjust the aperture settings of your camera manually. Since a longer shutter speed is needed for greater depth of field, less light is allowed to enter into the lens. If you increase your exposure but forget to close down your camera aperture, you'll end up with images that are over exposed.

Adjusting the aperture requires only moving the f-stop (usually a ring around the lens behind the focus ring) to whichever value will allow for the ideal amount of light. Most modern cameras will allow you to choose a shutter speed and will automatically adjust the f-stop accordingly, but if you have an older SLR you'll need to play with the light meter until the shutter speed you want syncs up with the correct aperture setting.

Helpful Tip: If you're working with high depth of field images it's likely that you'll be working with very long exposure times (depending upon the quality of your light). Taking pictures like this will usually require a tripod to prevent camera shake and image blur.

Depth of field is an important concept to understand and properly apply to every picture you take as it's a critical component to every photographer's arsenal. All subjects or objects in a picture have a story to tell so how you decide what's in and out of focus will impact the outcome of that story. Consider how you could use depth of field to impact what you can say about your subjects as this will help make your images more powerful and interesting.

Understanding Depth of Field by Changing Aperture with Bryan Peterson

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