Depth of Field

I’m taking a Digital Photography course this semester, and despite having experience “making images” (as my professor likes to say), this course has been tremendously valuable. Instead of just knowing that I have to press these certain buttons in this particular situation, now I’m learning why the camera reacts the way it does to every situation and how I can still make a beautiful image by simply adjusting a few settings. We recently completed a project that focused on depth of field by playing with the camera’s aperture settings, and I wanted to share a few of my images because I thought they came out really nicely. Aperture determines the size of the hole in the camera that allows light in. The smaller the f-stop (or number next to ‘f’): the larger the aperture: the bigger the hole. It’s all backwards really, which is why I’ve always had such a difficult time understanding it. Basically, the aperture affects what objects stand out in an image – in the simplest possible terms. With a large aperture (which is f/2.8 for my camera), the background will be incredibly blurry while the image remains crisply in focus, creating a shallow depth of field. When the aperture is small (which is f/22 for my camera), then there will be a deep depth of field, meaning that everything will be in focus, even objects far off in the distance.

Small Aperture (f/22)

Large Aperture (f/2.8)