Definition Post - Depth Of Field

Definition Post - Depth of Field

Depth of field is the front-to-back zone of a photograph where the image is sharp, when an object is out of this range it begins to lose focus. Shallow DOF is when the zone where it focuses is very small, a couple of inches or maybe a foot, deep DOF is when the included range is much larger, it can be the entire picture or a few feet.

The closer the subject to the camera, the more shallow the DOF.

This is quite a shallow DOF because only one of the people in the photo are very well focused, the others are getting out of focus.

This is also quite a shallow DOF, it is only focused on the one ball and the rest of the photo is very unfocused.

This is an example of wide DOF, it doesn't have any unfocused parts which works really well in this photograph, the photographer may have done this by making the aperture a high f-stop number like f22.

This is an example of shallow DOF as it is only a few inches long to fit the dragonfly.