What is Depth of Field?

Video Transcript

"When thinking about depth of field and aperture, it's important to understand three basic elements. And that's your foreground, your mid-ground, and your background. Because when taking photographs, your aperture setting is going to determine which of these items are in focus. So say you have foreground, mid-ground and background. And you want them all three in focus. You're going to want to use the minimum aperture setting which would be around F twenty-two or F twenty. One of your higher F stops, and that's going to allow you to get the full depth of field in focus. Now say you want to get a little trickier and only show the subject in focus which is in your mid-ground and you want the foreground and the background to be blurry you want to use a maximum aperture setting closer to two or four. So again, that type of setting is going to allow you to isolate your focus by having the depth of field only be strong enough to show one thing in focus. Now there's also some medium aperture settings you'll find around F eleven. And those are going to allow you to see maybe, the foreground and mid-ground in focus. Or the mid-ground and background in focus. Either way, it's not always with three objects on a table. You can think of these as like a dog running close to the camera, some people flying a kite in the middle of the part, and then trees back in the background. Aperture and understanding depth of field is very important to composing images in getting the right things in focus at the right time. So if you want to take strong images and have full control of what is in focus and what's in depth of field and what's out of the depth of field, you need to have an understanding of manual aperture settings."