Tag: Depth of field

Depth of field is an optical effect you can control with your choice of lens, focus distance and lens aperture. You can recreate the appearance of shallow depth of field digitally, but only up to a point, because the optical effect is created by the different distances of objects in 3D space, while the digital version is being applied to a two-dimension representation with no depth information at all.

So what depth of field effects rely on is the right kind of subject and some skill on the part of the photographer. You can blur a background effectively enough to give the impression and feel of shallow depth of field, but any experienced photographer will see straight away that it’s been done digitally.

But never mind, because very often the ‘feel’ and ‘impression’ of a picture is much more important than sheer technical accuracy. Digitally recreated depth of field can still transform a picture into beautiful image, even if it isn’t ‘right’.