How to Use Depth of Field for Better Photo Compositions

Depth of field is one of the most fundamental yet powerful tools for crafting your images, and it is important to make sure you have full creative and technical control of it in your work. This great video discusses three aspects of using depth of field to create stronger compositions.

Coming to you from our good friend, Pye Jirsa, along with Adorama TV, this excellent video discusses how you can use depth of field to create better compositions in your images. Personally, I think depth of field is something we do not discuss enough. It is such a powerful thing, as it allows us to use a natural physical property of optics to control the viewer's attention. Yet, it is very easy to treat it like a binary decision: either you use a very minimal depth of field to isolate your subject by blowing the background to smithereens, or you maximize it to keep everything in focus. The truth is, though, there is a vast range of apertures in-between the extremes, and it is absolutely worth exploring the sort of compositions you can create in the middle set of f-stops. Check out the video above for lots of helpful tips from Jirsa. 

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Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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