When shooting street photography and urban photography you generally want to use an aperture that keeps the background and the subject in focus which will serve a number of objectives: This allows the viewer to contextualise the image - they know it is a Street Portrait, as opposed to a portrait. Street Portraits with a wide-angle lens can look fantastic, as they can exaggerate the subject's features when shot very close, and at the same time allow the background to go slightly out of focus. However, this is because a longer focal length magnifies the subject, including the background, which is due to the fact that longer focal lengths have a narrower field of view and will fill the frame with a smaller area of background, than a wide-angle lens.įor an in-depth look at Depth of Field and focal length please visit this great post by Cambridge in Colour. In practice, it does appear that longer focal lengths cause the background to appear more blurred than a shorter focal length. This result in increasing front to back sharpness which is great for Landscape Photography and also Street Photography. Up the scale, the narrower the f stop, f / 8 to f /16 the greater depth of field there is. Generally, if you choose an aperture from f / 5.6 to f / 1.2 you will achieve a blurred background. If the depth of field refers to the amount of sharpness on a subject from front to back, then in order to blur out the background, you will need to select a wide aperture for a shallow depth of field. The Aperture is calculated as figures called f stops.Į.g. The wider the diaphragm opens, the more exposure (light) there will come through the lens and hits the sensor and conversely, the narrower the opening the less light there will be. The opening of the diaphragm is referred to as Aperture. The diaphragm of the camera lens opens to let light in. There are much deeper technical variables, such as the light conditions, or the speed of your moving subjects and other technical choices which allow for extra creativity and excitement. This is wide enough to allow you to use a fast action-stopping Shutter Speed and narrow enough to have enough Depth of Field across the scene. It’s very hard for the naked eye to notice this transition.The best aperture to use for Street Photography is f /8 or anything approximate to that f-stop. So, although we focused our camera on the river in the middle of the frame, we will have acceptable sharpness from the rocks in the foreground to the mountain range in the back because of this gradual, very slow transition to unsharp. In other words, a seemingly sharp landscape photograph is only acceptably sharp because of the large depth of field. ‘Acceptably sharp’ is a term often associated with depth of field and is used to demonstrate what should be a gradual transition from sharp to unsharp. Cameras do only focus sharply on one point, but this is where depth of field comes into play. This sounds like a lie, right? We’ve all taken a great landscape photograph where everything is in focus from the rocks in the foreground to the mountain range in the back. To elaborate, did you know that only one precise area of your image is in focus? The cameras we use are only capable of focussing sharply on one point. It’s the zone within the image that appears in focus. A technical definition of depth of field is, “the distance between the nearest and the furthest objects giving a focused image”.
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