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Using Depth of Field Creatively – Part One

Depth of field is just an optical part of life. There’s a question of efficiency — making sure it covers just what you want — but other than that, on simply practical grounds, there’s nothing to get too excited about. But this standard textbook approach, when you’re primed with the knowledge of hyperlocal distance and how aperture affects it and so on, runs the risk of missing out one the more interesting creative opportunities.

I’m using the word ‘creative’ carefully, because in any sphere it means challenging expectations and not meeting them. Right now it’s very much on my mind, as at my publisher Octopus we’re completing layout and about to go to press with the book I’ve been working on for the last year and a half — on creativity in photography.

Creativity’s a word that gets a lot of over-use, more often than not as a woolly, lazy description applied to any photograph that people want to promote. For it to mean anything useful, even for an optical condition like depth of field, it has to be about entertaining and exciting the viewer. Creative depth of field definitely calls for some element of surprise. Basically, it means using the depth of field — and also focus, which is inextricably part of it — in a way the the viewer wouldn’t normally expect.

There are three ways:

Shallow aka selective focus, with the most possibilities for being creative
Deep which is more limited in use but which can still deliver a strong image
Altered a special case inherited from the era of large-format studio film cameras

SHALLOW

Here are the most possibilities for creativity, simply because of the complete freedom you have in where you choose to focus. Everywhere else in the frame will have focus blur, and the wider the aperture the more blurred. To use selective focus effectively you need to manage the sharp-unsharp balance. So, how to surprise?

First, by challenging expectations, and when it comes to focus our eye and brain cannot help wanting sharp focus. If there’s a mixture of sharp and unsharp, our attention always, involuntarily, goes to the sharp, focused point. Now, that usually — or rather, expectedly — coincides with a subject that’s nearest in view. It’s logical, but that gives a clue for one way to make a shallow-depth shot a little more interesting. In a two-shot, like the banner picture above, where do you focus for maximum interest? It’s a matter of opinion, of course, but I favour the further face, because our natural tendency is to want the nearer face to be the focus. That means you encourage the eye to go to and fro across the image significantly more so than if you focused forward, when the viewer’s eye is likely to go to the nearer face — and stay there. Here’s how the focus works for the banner picture above…

Chinese Opera
Chinese Opera

But see how this image below doesn’t encourage the eye to move around the frame, despite the widescreen format.

Chinese Opera
Chinese Opera

We can go further with this, into a kind of picture that strongly forces the eye away from what it wants to see. This is using shallow depth of field to create a disruptive foreground that’s out of focus. While there’s nothing unusual in selective focus that favours the distance, if the out-of-focus foreground dominates in area and position it forces the attention to try and look around and behind it. It can’t be ignored, but because we are naturally and strongly drawn to sharpness in an image, our attention is confused. We want to see behind and beyond the foreground element, but then our eye slides back to it because if its size and position. This treatment tends to work best when there is sufficient information for the viewer to understand the foreground element: expression in a face, for example, can easily be read when blurred, and silhouettes can be perfectly legible. Here’s an example.

Tea tree ancestor ceremony
Disruptive foreground #1: Ceremony on Jinghai Mountain, southwest China

This above is a yearly ceremony on a remote tea mountain in the far southwest of China, in which offerings are made to the mythical ancestor who gave this ethnic group the tea tree. Members of the community circle the table of offerings, presenting small handfuls of sticky rice. It is a good-natured affair, and everyone is dressed traditionally for the occasion. Shooting predictably across the offering table towards the crowd on the other side would be fine, but predictable. Stepping back and waiting for the right moment gives the foreground of a woman with flowers in her hair — all of which is readable unfocused. This was selected from many frames, for three reasons: the defocused foreground has all the elements in place (flowers, hair, profile), the little girl fits neatly into the wedge-shaped gap between the face and shoulder, and the disembodied hand offering a ball of sticky rice adds a welcome vector to the scene.

Tea tree ceremony
Schema

Interestingly, when you are shooting like this, the degree of readability in the blurred foreground is not at all certain, especially if you shoot with both eyes open, as most people I know do. As you shoot, you know exactly what is going on close to the camera, but the defocusing effect of a wide aperture, which is all anyone else is going to see, will be less intelligible. Experimenting and selecting later is the only practical answer, and there is some entertainment in this uncertainty.

Here’s another example.

Bottle Inspectoin
Disruptive foreground #2: Bottle inspector, Coca-Cola, Khartoum

This is another occasion that merits some background information. This is a highly mechanised Coca-Cola plant, and the Sudanese company has a policy of employing disadvantaged people — in this case, with hearing impediments, so they are put to quality inspection on the bottle line. This makes the face of the inspector especially important. The shot is taken through the line, and the unfocused oblongs of light are reflections from the passing bottles. The timing of the shot is obviously critical, and this was one of many. As with the photograph of the tea tree ceremony, it needs a caption, which for some people will disqualify it as an image, but it played a part in telling a larger story of contemporary Sudan.

Disruptive foreground #2: Bottle inspector, Coca-Cola, Khartoum
Disruptive foreground #2: Bottle inspector, Coca-Cola, Khartoum

A second way to surprise is to use the out of focus areas to turn otherwise recognisable things into abstractions of soft colours and tones. The wider the aperture, the more selective the focus, and this is where fast lenses come into their own. The aperture here is ƒ1.4, and with a subject that goes deep away from the camera, like this young maple tree, most of the image will be blurred to one degree or another. This is is optical blur (forget boke/bokeh, which is simply Japanese for blur and has no special meaning for optics and photography beyond that), and is special because normal human eyesight does not experience it. We see things indistinct at the periphery of vision, but not blurred. This very optical blur gives images like this their visual appeal, so that what is not in focus is every bit as important as what is. The choice of exactly what to focus on is critical, and the result is a kind of layering, with the small sharp areas superimposed on the soft wash. If the color is notable, as here and on the following pages, it adds another level.

Kojimachi Kaikan
Young maple, Tokyo, 2001

 

17470_35_intcontrast_original
The difference in sharpness effectively creates two different perceptual layers, and heightens the complementary colour contrast

 

17470_35_colourcircle_blur_original
The difference in sharpness effectively creates two different perceptual layers, and heightens the complementary colour contrast

Now, blurred flowing colour behind the subject you focus on may be the most common way of doing this effect, but something very similar is possible with an out-of-focus foreground. The shooting style, however, is quite different and not so obvious. It involves shooting through gaps or around the edges of a colourful subject close to the camera, while focusing on something distant. And it also means keeping the blurred colours of the foreground dominant, so this is not a natural shooting technique. Here, the location was Fatahilah Square on a busy weekend in Jakarta, Indonesia, and I was looking for ways of shooting the sidewalk food stalls – people at tables and the vendors with their bright mobile carts, each with glass cases full of noodles and other foods. Looking for a way to combine both, and having experimented only a little successfully with reflections in the glass cases, I decided to shoot through the glass to the people sitting beyond, at full aperture (ƒ2.8) with a 200mm telephoto. It involved a lot of moving around, not least to get the right amount of blur, which depended on how close I was to the lettering.

Fatahilah Square
Fatahilah Square, Jakarta, 2012
_NA__original
The degree of blur depends on how close the camera is to the lettering

Using Depth of Field Creatively – Part Two

Michael FreemanOther articles by author

In a 40 year career, internationally renowned photographer and author Michael Freeman has focused on documentary travel reportage, and has been published in all major publications worldwide, including Time-Life, GEO and a 30-year relationship with the Smithsonian magazine. He is also the world’s top author of photography books, drawing on his long experience.
In total, he has published 133 books, with 4 million copies sold, including 66 on the craft of photography, published in 27 languages. With an MA in Geography from Oxford University, Freeman went first into advertising before launching his career in editorial photography with a journey up the Amazon.

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