Shallow Depth of Field

About

Depth of field is the zone of a scene that looks acceptably sharp. Wide apertures, long lenses and close subjects make it shallow, so a single plane stands out against soft blur. Early photographers often had little choice: slow emulsions demanded wide apertures, which made focus thin, and Julia Margaret Cameron embraced the resulting softness in her portraits of the 1860s.

Around 1900 Pictorialists welcomed soft focus for painterly mood, while California's Group f/64, formed in 1932 by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others, stopped their lenses down for sharpness throughout. Shallow focus returned in colour photography and cinema, where it steers the eye to a face or object. Terri Weifenbach photographs gardens and fields in which colour dissolves into haze. Look at how the blur is used, to isolate, suggest distance or create a mood, and at out-of-focus highlights, which take the shape of the lens opening.