What Exactly Does Depth of Field in Photography Mean?

Depth of field in photography can sometimes be a difficult and tricky thing for quite a lot of people to get their heads around. I know this for a fact since I was one of these people. And just to prove that I’m not making this all up, I’ll have you know that a number of my photography friends also admitted to this fact! The problem doesn’t come in the beginning, but more towards the middle when you’re mired knee deep in the explanation and you realize that what you thought you understood wasn’t really what you should have understood.

Luckily for me though I now understand what depth of field in photography is, and can make things work properly so I can take a good photograph. To put it simply though and to start you out in your explanation, let’s take a garden scene with a solitary rose right in the middle of it. You want to take a picture of the rose, but you’re not sure how you want it to look so you start fiddling around with your camera and take a variety of different shots. In the first shot, you make it so that the rose and everything around it – the garden and its surroundings – are very sharp. Everything in this picture is sharp and clear.

Then you take another shot, but this time you place more emphasis on the rose, and put everything else slightly out of focus. You can still see various different forms from the background and you might be able to recognize them for what they are, but they’re not so well defined as earlier. Foreground elements though, are still very much recognizable. Then you go the next step and take another photograph. This time the rose is more prominent and eye catching, while both the foreground and the background aren’t as much, and most of it is blurred and blended in together.

The next shot that you take, you focus solely on the rose to the exclusion of everything else, and make both the foreground and the background completely unrecognizable as anything other than a convenient anonymous backdrop for you main focal point, the rose. Now, although that was a demonstration of what depth of field in photography can look like in a picture, it probably didn’t explain very well exactly what it is.

You might have guessed, but for those of you who are wondering what on earth I’m talking about, just like I used to wonder on earth, depth of field in photography was all about, here it is in nice simple sentences. depth of field in photography, very simply stated, is how much of foreground and background you put into your photograph.
If you take any photographic scene, the sharpness in front of, and behind your subject is what you would call depth of field in photography. If your subject is the main attraction with an out of focus front and back, you would have a shallow depth of field in photography, and if you have the whole scene in sharp focus, both front and back, you would have a wide depth of field in photography.

It’s not exactly confusing just yet is it? It might not be exactly clear either, but then again, just reading this article isn’t really going to solve all of your camera problems. You need to get out there with your camera and try different settings for you to be able to fully grasp and appreciate what depth of field in photography is.
That said, there are a few things that come into consideration when you’re looking into depth of field in photography and those go along the lines of, image magnification, lens aperture setting and the focal length of your lens.