Depth of Feeling

Every year, as Spring flowers emerge, I amuse my wife with a routine involving the movement of folders, envelopes, boxes, and plastic containers, aka I’m cleaning my office.

So it is again, as I’ve now squeezed the contents of a squat three-drawer file cabinet into one drawer of a larger unit. That’s serious space saving, except the shorter drawers were filled haphazardly and don’t quite fill the longer one, and now there’s a box of folders containing 4000 slides on the floor under my desk. Huh? (They fit really well in a longer drawer. Maybe they’ll fit in that little cabinet, too.)

While doing this kind of work it’s important to pause frequently and inspect the papers and photos that have collected in the folders and envelopes. I call this quality control, and I’m amazed some of this stuff hasn’t been recalled. As I review long-forgotten materials (e.g. “High School Writing Class”) I replace dog-eared folders with new ones (after reading any notes scribbled along the margins in 1985).

None of this had anything to do with depth-of-field until I unearthed an article I’d written about it for Backpacker Magazine back in, oh, 1985. Titled From Near to Infinity, its illustrative photos wrapped around 1500 words on a very dry photographic subject. I didn’t break any new ground in my explanations of how DOF works, being content to show that it simply does. Getting one’s head around the numbers, or f/stops, where 16 is small and 2 is large, is at first confusing but becomes second nature after a short while.

The photo I’ve posted here, of a twisting walled lane in English farming country, is a reminder that every photo presents choices, and aperture can be the most important of those. Crouched between the stones, I felt a narrow DOF served its character, and so chose a moderate 135mm telephoto to isolate the rocks, focused selectively, and made the exposure shooting wide open at f/2. The result is exactly what I envisioned.

Two points here: first, a lens is always open to its maximum f/stop until you press the shutter release, when it stops down to the aperture you’ve set. When I looked through the viewfinder at this country scene I thus saw how it would appear at f/2, wide open. Secondly, a camera’s DOF preview button allows one to judge the depth in a scene (although the button’s sadly gone missing from some newer bodies). Shooting at f/2 I was confident my photo would be as seen, but if I’d chosen another aperture setting (like f/16, say, for increased DOF) I could preview it for effect.

When you understand how aperture affects a photo you can then choose a setting appropriate to your feelings about a subject, and that’s far superior to letting the camera do it for you (via the Auto setting). Used thoughtfully, and carefully, the letters DOF will soon translate into Depth of Feeling.