Cliff Mautner: Creative Use of Depth of Field

Control of depth-of-field is one of the most creative tools photographers have.

But what exactly is depth-of-field?

In the most basic terms, it's the distance in front of and beyond the subject that appears to be in focus.

Choose your subject—that rosebush in your garden, for example—and focus on it. Depending on what you decide now, you can make the grass in front of that bush sharp or soft; likewise, the fence behind the bush.

Choose to let the foreground and background go soft and you've effectively isolated your subject and called specific attention to it. Choose to have the foreground and background sharp, and the rose bush becomes an element in the overall scene.

The key to using depth-of-field to isolate or blend your subject is lens aperture. Wide apertures, such as f/2.8 or f/3.5, provide shallow depth-of-field: your subject is sharp, but little else is. Narrow apertures, like f/16 or f/22, provide a much greater depth-of-field, so that the territory in front of and behind the subject will be in focus. Simply, the smaller the number, the shallower the depth-of-field; the greater the number, the greater the depth-of-field.

Selective Focus
I primarily shoot weddings, and depth-of-field, along with light, helps me create depth, texture and dimension in my pictures. I took Image 1 with a 50mm f/1.4 AF NIKKOR, and I shot wide open—meaning the lens aperture was at its maximum opening, f/1.4. Small number, shallow depth-of-field—which is exactly what I wanted. I really loved the buttons on the dress, and I wanted to accentuate them as much as possible. By selecting the wide open aperture, I was choosing to have only a few of the buttons in focus while everything else went soft. This process is called selective focus, and the result in this picture is that the few sharp buttons really stand out—and your eye is directed to exactly what I want you to see.

Another example of how I use selective focus is Image 2, which was taken with an 85mm f/1.4 AF NIKKOR. As I photographed this bride, I thought her eyelashes were just stunning. I chose to make one of them jump out of the frame by carefully composing the image, focusing on the eyelash and shooting at f/1.4—again, wide open. By using depth-of-field in this way, I created an image that has more impact than one taken at, say, f/5.6. The falloff is dramatic, and there's no doubt about my intended center of attention.