Idle thoughts on over-use of shallow DOF with fast lenses wide open

[mfunnell]

Before I even get started, I'll fully acknowledge this is probably a subject which is well "done to death".

Nonetheless, two or three scotches into the evening, and contemplating a photo I took today, I thought to put my idle thoughts out here anyway.

Here's the photo, for what it's worth:


It was absolutely taken as a test photo, with it's primary (initial) purpose being testing how well (by my standards) I do when converting digital colour to B&W - yet (it seems) I've added a secondary purpose of going through my range of 50mm RF lenses (yikes! I have a lot) to re-familiarise myself with how they render.

Which is how, here, I think I got myself "in trouble" as it were. If I followed my natural inclinations when taking this photo, I'd have stopped my lens (a Canon 50mm/F1.4 in LTM) down to about f2.8 or more likely f4. But I was testing. So I kept the lens wide open. I suspect this would be a better photograph if I had stopped down (I'm not saying it would be a good photo, just a better one).

If I had, I'd still have had foreground subject separation, the point of best focus would still be the coffee cup, but the overall rendering, I'm guessing (I can only guess) would be 'better' - at least to the extent that all of my foreground subject (the bloke in the white T-shirt) would be in acceptable focus, not just the coffee cup and the seam of his jeans (which is where the plane of focus happened to run - I was looking at the coffee cup alone).

My guess is that, too often, people wanting subject isolation think only of "fast lens, wide open" and less of "light playing with shadow" and other tone and contrast factors quite separate from simple narrow depth-of-field.

Or maybe I've just had a scotch (or two) too many for today.

Your thoughts?

...Mike

 

[peterm1]

I often shoot a lens longer than 35mm or 50mm and shoot it, if not wide open then at least stopped down only one or two stops. I think this is perfectly OK - or can be, so long as it is done with intention. Of course it will not work out every time, but speaking personally I prefer to have some subject separation in most cases - not always. This is not to say I am always chasing "pretty" bokeh. That's a different matter altogether.

Two points. I do not think the best point of focus is the coffee cup. At least not in this photo. I generally find that it is best to have a point of focus that is the intended prime subject of the photo. I cannot imagine you intended this for the coffee cup. I think had I taken it I would have made the male foreground subject's head (if necessary his ear) the point of focus as he is the main subject to my way of thinking - not the coffee cup. Also focus fall off generally (not always) works best if the focus fall off is progressive and mostly to the rear of the subject and grows progressively more out of focus as the distance increases.

The second point is that for whatever reason the background (particularly the woman closest to the camera) is not OOF focus sufficiently to satisfy me though this may be entirely personal preference. Oddly, I suspect this might be one of the photos which I have observed from time to time in my photo making, where this sort of intermediate OOF would look better if the entire photo were in color. Not sure why that should be, it just seems so based on my experience.

Or alternatively as you yourself suggest, I think it to be entirely plausible that it could be argued that this level of OOF focus is a bit too much in this composition - the ladies in the background could be rendered more sharply by stopping down a little and this might add something to the image. But I do think you are right and that this would work well. But as I said above making them less sharp might also improve the photo by removing some of the background "busyness"- it is all a matter of interpretation.

BTW on the subject of your conversion of the image to B and W. It looks well done to me with nice tonal values. And you are perfectly correct in saying that it's not just a matter of shooting wide open and hoping good blur covers a multitude of sins. Tone and the interplay of tonal values are critical - which is why I often resort to post processing to come up with tonal results that somehow add enticement to my images. To my way of thinking there is nothing quite so boring as a black and white images with "flat" even lighting and toning across the whole image. Ansel Adams knew this, which is why he spent so much time in the darkroom tweaking his images.

Just observations - forgive me for saying this but you did ask for thoughts. BTW you say you have been drinking scotch. Well done - man after my own heart! 😉

Here is one I took that perhaps illustrates what I am getting at. It is taken with a 50mm f2 Nikkor which is not terribly different from what you used but the bokeh blur is a bit stronger (off to the right and behind) and I have also emphasized the lighting that was naturally falling on the subject and behind her to further drive home the fact that indeed she is the intended subject. I hope it is subtle enough not to hit people between the eyes though it is undoubtedly more obvious now that I have confessed. 😛

On any Street by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

 

[Richard G]

I agree Mike. I’m a bit over wide open shots with fast lenses. I got a nice effect with my 28mm f5.6 Summaron M ‘wide open’ Sunday evening, a white lily and its yellow stamen alone in dark green foliage. I’m mostly using f2.8 lenses for their size. Even the classic 50 Elmar f3.5 has a nice gentle bokeh at that aperture close up. I can have fun with Zeiss C Sonnar 50, but more reliably at f2 and 2.8 than at f1.5. It should be part of a plan, not a habit.

 

[KoNickon]

A lot of the time, either the film speed or ISO is too high, or distance to the subject is too great (outside in bright light for instance) to rely on shallow depth of field to isolate the subject. In that event you have to rely on the subject naturally standing out, like with a contrasting color or by framing the picture, to do that. But still, all the more reason to make sure your background isn't distracting.

 

[mfunnell]

I often shoot a lens longer than 35mm or 50mm and shoot it, if not wide open then at least stopped down only one or two stops. I think this is perfectly OK - or can be, so long as it is done with intention. Of course it will not work out every time, but speaking personally I prefer to have some subject separation in most cases - not always. This is not to say I am always chasing "pretty" bokeh. That's a different matter altogether.

Two points. I do not think the best point of focus is the coffee cup. At least not in this photo. I generally find that it is best to have a point of focus that is the intended prime subject of the photo. I cannot imagine you intended this for the coffee cup. I think had I taken it I would have made the male foreground subject's head (if necessary his ear) the point of focus as he is the main subject to my way of thinking - not the coffee cup. Also focus fall off generally (not always) works best if the focus fall off is progressive and mostly to the rear of the subject and grows progressively more out of focus as the distance increases.

The second point is that for whatever reason the background (particularly the woman closest to the camera) is not OOF focus sufficiently to satisfy me though this may be entirely personal preference. Oddly, I suspect this might be one of the photos which I have observed from time to time in my photo making, where this sort of intermediate OOF would look better if the entire photo were in color. Not sure why that should be, it just seems so based on my experience.

Or alternatively as you yourself suggest, I think it to be entirely plausible that it could be argued that this level of OOF focus is a bit too much in this composition - the ladies in the background could be rendered more sharply by stopping down a little and this might add something to the image. But I do think you are right and that this would work well. But as I said above making them less sharp might also improve the photo by removing some of the background "busyness"- it is all a matter of interpretation.

BTW on the subject of your conversion of the image to B and W. It looks well done to me with nice tonal values. And you are perfectly correct in saying that it's not just a matter of shooting wide open and hoping good blur covers a multitude of sins. Tone and the interplay of tonal values are critical - which is why I often resort to post processing to come up with tonal results that somehow add enticement to my images. To my way of thinking there is nothing quite so boring as a black and white images with "flat" even lighting and toning across the whole image. Ansel Adams knew this, which is why he spent so much time in the darkroom tweaking his images.

Just observations - forgive me for saying this but you did ask for thoughts. BTW you say you have been drinking scotch. Well done - man after my own heart! 😉

Here is one I took that perhaps illustrates what I am getting at. It is taken with a 50mm f2 Nikkor which is not terribly different from what you used but the bokeh blur is a bit stronger (off to the right and behind) and I have also emphasized the lighting that was naturally falling on the subject and behind her to further drive home the fact that indeed she is the intended subject. I hope it is subtle enough not to hit people between the eyes though it is undoubtedly more obvious now that I have confessed. 😛

On any Street by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

Trust me - I absolutely intended to focus on the coffee cup. Remember: I was taking this quite intentionally as "a test shot" rather than taking it as "a photograph I wanted to capture" (though, sure, I wanted it to be more interesting than merely "a brick wall").

There was a lot less distance between my "subject" (which "should" have been the bloke in the white T-shirt, but was in fact the coffee cup), the background people and objects in my photo, and the subjects in your photo (thanks, BTW: yours is a good photo).

If I had been taking mine as "an intentional photograph" rather than "a test shot" then I guess I would have done it rather differently (had the opportunity presented itself). I was really wanting (as my primary purpose) something to practice B&W conversion with (so how it looked in colour was and is, to me, neither here nor there) and has also become (now that I've started this) an opportunity to remind myself of how my various 50mm lenses render (with wide-open rendering being, I'm imagining, more revealing than stopped-down).

...Mike

 

[peterm1]

I agree. I’m a bit over wide open shots with fast lenses. I got a nice effect with my 28mm f5.6 Summaron M ‘wide open’ Sunday evening, a white lily and its yellow stamen alone in dark green foliage. I’m mostly using f2.8 lenses for their size. Even the classic 50 Elmar f3.5 has a nice gentle bokeh at that aperture close up. I can have fun with Zeiss C Sonnar 50, but more reliably at f2 and 2.8 than at f1.5. It should be part of a plan, not a habit.

Yes I agree this can work well and I try to use it where I can. Here is one of my shots ( in color) which I particularly like. It has some blur - enough to smudge some unnecessary and distracting detail from the image but not so much as to turn the background into a blancmange of meaningless shapes and color. Again, it's a matter of the artist's intention in making the image. In this one it's really about light and shadow and in particular the way the soft warm light spills from the window to the right rear and helps illuminate the scene. Again, it's that interplay of light and shadow, color, shapes and details/lack of detail. For me at least it works as an image. (Though this one, I can't imagine it would work half so well as a black and white image - it would lose too much in this specific case.) These little laneways in Melbourne Australia have a feeling of intimacy that I hope is represented here and that only comes with getting those factors right and in balance. Anyway, that's what I think.

Laneways of Melbourne by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

 

[peterm1]

Trust me - I absolutely intended to focus on the coffee cup. Remember: I was taking this quite intentionally as "a test shot" rather than taking it as "a photograph I wanted to capture" (though, sure, I wanted it to be more interesting than merely "a brick wall").

There was a lot less distance between my "subject" (which "should" have been the bloke in the white T-shirt, but was in fact the coffee cup), the background people and objects in my photo, and the subjects in your photo (thanks, BTW: yours is a good photo).

If I had been taking mine as "an intentional photograph" rather than "a test shot" then I guess I would have done it rather differently (had the opportunity presented itself). I was really wanting (as my primary purpose) something to practice B&W conversion with (so how it looked in colour was and is, to me, neither here nor there) and has also become (now that I've started this) an opportunity to remind myself of how my various 50mm lenses render (with wide-open rendering being, I'm imagining, more revealing than stopped-down).

...Mike

I can see exactly what you are saying. 🙂

 

[peterm1]

Trust me - I absolutely intended to focus on the coffee cup. Remember: I was taking this quite intentionally as "a test shot" rather than taking it as "a photograph I wanted to capture" (though, sure, I wanted it to be more interesting than merely "a brick wall").

There was a lot less distance between my "subject" (which "should" have been the bloke in the white T-shirt, but was in fact the coffee cup), the background people and objects in my photo, and the subjects in your photo (thanks, BTW: yours is a good photo).

If I had been taking mine as "an intentional photograph" rather than "a test shot" then I guess I would have done it rather differently (had the opportunity presented itself). I was really wanting (as my primary purpose) something to practice B&W conversion with (so how it looked in colour was and is, to me, neither here nor there) and has also become (now that I've started this) an opportunity to remind myself of how my various 50mm lenses render (with wide-open rendering being, I'm imagining, more revealing than stopped-down).

...Mike

On the subject of 50mm lenses and their rendition I know what you mean. I have far too many and understanding how each behaves in various situations is a hell of a chore. But a fun one. I was messing around today with two that were interesting - the first was a Minolta 58mm f1.4 which has an interesting rendition which is somewhat low contrast and a little soft wide open with "bubble bokeh". The other was a Schneider Kreuznach 50mm f1.9 which is much more precise and sumptuous in its colors and tones. it really drove home to me just how different two lenses can be - even when their focal length and apertures are fairly similar and they both have optical designs that derived from the double gauss design. Now its a matter of working out how to best use them each in shooting situations.

 

[mfunnell]

On the subject of 50mm lenses and their rendition I know what you mean. I have far too many and understanding how each behaves in various situations is a hell of a chore. But a fun one.

One thing this test shot has shown me (so to that extent, the photo is a success) is that I find the OOF background at f1.4 a bit too "jittery" and "nervous" for my liking. I suspect I prefer the wide-open rendering of the ZM C-Sonnar 50mm/f1.5 a bit better (though I'll have to test that some more to be sure). I do like the Canon stopped down a bit, though. Trade-offs and different characteristics. It's always the way. (One of my very favourite 50mm lenses, overall, is the Elmar-M. Usually, f2.8 as its widest aperture isn't a problem. Until it is. Trade-offs.)

...Mike

 

[Sonnar Brian]

1953 J-3, wide-open on the Canon 7. from 2009.


So, what you are saying is that someone invented a mechanism to increase DOF when using a lens.
Must be optional.

 

[oldwino]

I find that many older lenses have "dramatic" bokeh when shot wide open, but pretty nice OOF when stopped down a stop. Sometimes, just half a stop will improve it.
Of course, that "drama" can also be used for good effect in some situations.

 

[wlewisiii]

I was using a fairly slow lens this morning, not even wide open but focused close up (bees on the flowers) so naturally the landscape in the distance is OOF as I wanted. This is a normal thing. To be sure I could have closed it down to f/22 and very possibly had all of that in focus, but that would have distracted from those two bumblebees. Using your fast lens this way is only to be expected as it's one of the ways they are intended to be used. I have a nice Canon 50/1.4 in LTM like the OP's and tend to use it wide open simply because it renders beautifully that way.

 

[peterm1]

One thing this test shot has shown me (so to that extent, the photo is a success) is that I find the OOF background at f1.4 a bit too "jittery" and "nervous" for my liking. I suspect I prefer the wide-open rendering of the ZM C-Sonnar 50mm/f1.5 a bit better (though I'll have to test that some more to be sure). I do like the Canon stopped down a bit, though. Trade-offs and different characteristics. It's always the way. (One of my very favourite 50mm lenses, overall, is the Elmar-M. Usually, f2.8 as its widest aperture isn't a problem. Until it is. Trade-offs.)

...Mike

Yes as regards the Sonnar alternative I have seldom found lenses with a Sonnar design that have let me down in that department. They are pretty reliable in their ability to turn in pleasantly smooth bokeh in the background.

 

[Evergreen States]

I remember this discussion happening regarding video and film production back in the late 2000s. So, as background, movies shot on 35mm film have run the film through the camera vertically, using a bit less than half the negative area as 135 format stills. For a long time, digital movie cameras had much smaller sensors than this, even smaller than a 16mm or super 16 negative. So the lenses these cameras used weren't able to use selective focus to blur foregrounds and backgrounds. Then in 2007 a startup called Red came out with the Red One, a modular digital movie camera that shot 4K resolution. And the kicker: the sensor was the same size as the super 35 gate (about the size of APS-C), allowing it to shoot cinema lenses without a crop factor. It was quickly adopted by Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh who declared the death of film. In 2008, Canon released the 5D Mark II, the first DSLR that could shoot 1080p video. This time the sensor wasn't just S35, it was VistaVision sized. Canon followed up with the 7D, which also shot 1080p HD video. Even though the Red was cheap for a motion picture camera at around $25,000, the Canons brought high quality HD video into the hands of microbudget indie filmmakers for the first time. And this time they could finally shoot with shallow depth of field like real filmmakers did.

But as Dr. Ian Malcom famously said, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. So the trend went from extreme deep focus to extreme shallow focus, as enterprising young filmmakers shot their short films and microbudget features with their Canon lenses wide open all the time. This persisted until filmmakers, bloggers and video essayists started pointing out that a lot of old movies from 1930s and 1940 Hollywood used action along the Z-axis to tell the story. They didn't just stick the actors in one place, but they moved them around, side to side and back and forth. They had fairly fast lenses back then, but their film was a lot slower than we have today. Shallow focus would have been the easier option. But they used very powerful, very hot, very complicated lighting setups to ensure that they had enough depth of field to tell the story. And they noticed that even more recent Hollywood cinematographers would often not shoot their lenses wide open or even fully stopped down. It's actually common for some cinematographers to pick one T stop and shoot the entire movie that way, allowing subject distance and lens focal length to give variation in depth of field. This made it easier to light consistently, but it also allowed for a bit of focus falloff when the moment in the story called for it. If you notice in a lot of movies, sometimes the background will be just enough out of focus that you can make out what kind of action is taking place. It's neither an incoherent blur nor is it competing with the foreground actors for your attention. So then you started to see a trend of filmmakers gravitate back towards a more moderate middle ground of seeing depth of field as a creative storytelling tool.


In parallel to this, as I realized filmmaking wasn't in the cards for me and I got more into photography, I saw a similar phenomenon. "Full frame" digital cameras were becoming within reach for amateur photographers, and wide-aperture lenses along with them. So all kinds of photography genres went through this trend from APS-C users struggling to blur the background enough with their zoom lenses to this glut of photographers shooting wide open with ƒ/1.2 50mm and 85mm lenses. Some with a more sensible artistic eye noticed that often some context adds to portraits and dialed things back. Then you also had the resurgence of street photography, where people who couldn't afford Frank and Winogrand's Leicas rediscovered zone focusing with wide angle lenses with their DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, where, no, actually, real talent is capturing scenes when everything front to back is in focus and all the action falls into place at just the right moment.

In my own photography, I tend to prefer deep focus because it makes capturing these moments easer. But even in the vacant, deserted streetscapes I tend to shoot, I can capture the whole scene front to back. I sometimes wonder whether I've just become lazy and used deep focus as a crutch the way a lot of photographers used shallow focus as a crutch back when the 5D Mark II and Mark III were hot. I was always too poor to afford full frame DSLRs and their high speed red ring Canon primes, but I have a couple Fuji lenses that can get pretty shallow and some medium format film gear that can too. But I tend to find myself using them wide open only when I feel it's necessary, but I do use them wide open sometimes. So maybe my instincts are better than I fear they are. Maybe.

 

[mfunnell]

I remember this discussion happening regarding video and film production back in the late 2000s. So, as background, movies shot on 35mm film have run the film through the camera vertically, using a bit less than half the negative area as 135 format stills. For a long time, digital movie cameras had much smaller sensors than this, even smaller than a 16mm or super 16 negative. So the lenses these cameras used weren't able to use selective focus to blur foregrounds and backgrounds. Then in 2007 a startup called Red came out with the Red One, a modular digital movie camera that shot 4K resolution. And the kicker: the sensor was the same size as the super 35 gate (about the size of APS-C), allowing it to shoot cinema lenses without a crop factor. It was quickly adopted by Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh who declared the death of film. In 2008, Canon released the 5D Mark II, the first DSLR that could shoot 1080p video. This time the sensor wasn't just S35, it was VistaVision sized. Canon followed up with the 7D, which also shot 1080p HD video. Even though the Red was cheap for a motion picture camera at around $25,000, the Canons brought high quality HD video into the hands of microbudget indie filmmakers for the first time. And this time they could finally shoot with shallow depth of field like real filmmakers did.

But as Dr. Ian Malcom famously said, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. So the trend went from extreme deep focus to extreme shallow focus, as enterprising young filmmakers shot their short films and microbudget features with their Canon lenses wide open all the time. This persisted until filmmakers, bloggers and video essayists started pointing out that a lot of old movies from 1930s and 1940 Hollywood used action along the Z-axis to tell the story. They didn't just stick the actors in one place, but they moved them around, side to side and back and forth. They had fairly fast lenses back then, but their film was a lot slower than we have today. Shallow focus would have been the easier option. But they used very powerful, very hot, very complicated lighting setups to ensure that they had enough depth of field to tell the story. And they noticed that even more recent Hollywood cinematographers would often not shoot their lenses wide open or even fully stopped down. It's actually common for some cinematographers to pick one T stop and shoot the entire movie that way, allowing subject distance and lens focal length to give variation in depth of field. This made it easier to light consistently, but it also allowed for a bit of focus falloff when the moment in the story called for it. If you notice in a lot of movies, sometimes the background will be just enough out of focus that you can make out what kind of action is taking place. It's neither an incoherent blur nor is it competing with the foreground actors for your attention. So then you started to see a trend of filmmakers gravitate back towards a more moderate middle ground of seeing depth of field as a creative storytelling tool.


In parallel to this, as I realized filmmaking wasn't in the cards for me and I got more into photography, I saw a similar phenomenon. "Full frame" digital cameras were becoming within reach for amateur photographers, and wide-aperture lenses along with them. So all kinds of photography genres went through this trend from APS-C users struggling to blur the background enough with their zoom lenses to this glut of photographers shooting wide open with ƒ/1.2 50mm and 85mm lenses. Some with a more sensible artistic eye noticed that often some context adds to portraits and dialed things back. Then you also had the resurgence of street photography, where people who couldn't afford Frank and Winogrand's Leicas rediscovered zone focusing with wide angle lenses with their DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, where, no, actually, real talent is capturing scenes when everything front to back is in focus and all the action falls into place at just the right moment.

In my own photography, I tend to prefer deep focus because it makes capturing these moments easer. But even in the vacant, deserted streetscapes I tend to shoot, I can capture the whole scene front to back. I sometimes wonder whether I've just become lazy and used deep focus as a crutch the way a lot of photographers used shallow focus as a crutch back when the 5D Mark II and Mark III were hot. I was always too poor to afford full frame DSLRs and their high speed red ring Canon primes, but I have a couple Fuji lenses that can get pretty shallow and some medium format film gear that can too. But I tend to find myself using them wide open only when I feel it's necessary, but I do use them wide open sometimes. So maybe my instincts are better than I fear they are. Maybe.

Thanks for that - you say a lot of what I was trying to say (and more), but say it better.

I was especially enamoured with your "Ian Malcolm" quotation: "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should” - which is a neat summary of the point I was trying to make.

It's not that I'm against using shallow depth-of-field, which is entirely appropriate in some cases. It's just that in some cases it isn't appropriate yet too often seems reflexively used just because it can be.

...Mike

 

[Erik van Straten]

gelatin silver print (summilux 35mm f1.4 steel rim) leica m2

train from Nijmegen to Amsterdam, 2018

Erik.

 

[peterm1]

I remember this discussion happening regarding video and film production back in the late 2000s. So, as background, movies shot on 35mm film have run the film through the camera vertically, using a bit less than half the negative area as 135 format stills. For a long time, digital movie cameras had much smaller sensors than this, even smaller than a 16mm or super 16 negative. So the lenses these cameras used weren't able to use selective focus to blur foregrounds and backgrounds. Then in 2007 a startup called Red came out with the Red One, a modular digital movie camera that shot 4K resolution. And the kicker: the sensor was the same size as the super 35 gate (about the size of APS-C), allowing it to shoot cinema lenses without a crop factor. It was quickly adopted by Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh who declared the death of film. In 2008, Canon released the 5D Mark II, the first DSLR that could shoot 1080p video. This time the sensor wasn't just S35, it was VistaVision sized. Canon followed up with the 7D, which also shot 1080p HD video. Even though the Red was cheap for a motion picture camera at around $25,000, the Canons brought high quality HD video into the hands of microbudget indie filmmakers for the first time. And this time they could finally shoot with shallow depth of field like real filmmakers did.

But as Dr. Ian Malcom famously said, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. So the trend went from extreme deep focus to extreme shallow focus, as enterprising young filmmakers shot their short films and microbudget features with their Canon lenses wide open all the time. This persisted until filmmakers, bloggers and video essayists started pointing out that a lot of old movies from 1930s and 1940 Hollywood used action along the Z-axis to tell the story. They didn't just stick the actors in one place, but they moved them around, side to side and back and forth. They had fairly fast lenses back then, but their film was a lot slower than we have today. Shallow focus would have been the easier option. But they used very powerful, very hot, very complicated lighting setups to ensure that they had enough depth of field to tell the story. And they noticed that even more recent Hollywood cinematographers would often not shoot their lenses wide open or even fully stopped down. It's actually common for some cinematographers to pick one T stop and shoot the entire movie that way, allowing subject distance and lens focal length to give variation in depth of field. This made it easier to light consistently, but it also allowed for a bit of focus falloff when the moment in the story called for it. If you notice in a lot of movies, sometimes the background will be just enough out of focus that you can make out what kind of action is taking place. It's neither an incoherent blur nor is it competing with the foreground actors for your attention. So then you started to see a trend of filmmakers gravitate back towards a more moderate middle ground of seeing depth of field as a creative storytelling tool.


In parallel to this, as I realized filmmaking wasn't in the cards for me and I got more into photography, I saw a similar phenomenon. "Full frame" digital cameras were becoming within reach for amateur photographers, and wide-aperture lenses along with them. So all kinds of photography genres went through this trend from APS-C users struggling to blur the background enough with their zoom lenses to this glut of photographers shooting wide open with ƒ/1.2 50mm and 85mm lenses. Some with a more sensible artistic eye noticed that often some context adds to portraits and dialed things back. Then you also had the resurgence of street photography, where people who couldn't afford Frank and Winogrand's Leicas rediscovered zone focusing with wide angle lenses with their DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, where, no, actually, real talent is capturing scenes when everything front to back is in focus and all the action falls into place at just the right moment.

In my own photography, I tend to prefer deep focus because it makes capturing these moments easer. But even in the vacant, deserted streetscapes I tend to shoot, I can capture the whole scene front to back. I sometimes wonder whether I've just become lazy and used deep focus as a crutch the way a lot of photographers used shallow focus as a crutch back when the 5D Mark II and Mark III were hot. I was always too poor to afford full frame DSLRs and their high speed red ring Canon primes, but I have a couple Fuji lenses that can get pretty shallow and some medium format film gear that can too. But I tend to find myself using them wide open only when I feel it's necessary, but I do use them wide open sometimes. So maybe my instincts are better than I fear they are. Maybe.

As for me, I do not really care too much about whether a shot of mine has a lot of out of focus, a little out of focus or no out of focus area - so long as it looks good and works in the context of what I am trying to do. Though having said that I must acknowledge that I often find deep focus with lots of detail distracting and so I often do use OOF zones to concentrate the viewer's attention where I want it to be. It's just a different approach to the one you prefer. But it's not a deeply committed "ideological" thing. It's just a question of my personal sense of aesthetics which leads me to decide more or less on a case by case basis how I will compose and shoot it.

 

[Archiver]

But as Dr. Ian Malcom famously said, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. So the trend went from extreme deep focus to extreme shallow focus, as enterprising young filmmakers shot their short films and microbudget features with their Canon lenses wide open all the time. This persisted until filmmakers, bloggers and video essayists started pointing out that a lot of old movies from 1930s and 1940 Hollywood used action along the Z-axis to tell the story. They didn't just stick the actors in one place, but they moved them around, side to side and back and forth. They had fairly fast lenses back then, but their film was a lot slower than we have today. Shallow focus would have been the easier option. But they used very powerful, very hot, very complicated lighting setups to ensure that they had enough depth of field to tell the story. And they noticed that even more recent Hollywood cinematographers would often not shoot their lenses wide open or even fully stopped down. It's actually common for some cinematographers to pick one T stop and shoot the entire movie that way, allowing subject distance and lens focal length to give variation in depth of field. This made it easier to light consistently, but it also allowed for a bit of focus falloff when the moment in the story called for it. If you notice in a lot of movies, sometimes the background will be just enough out of focus that you can make out what kind of action is taking place. It's neither an incoherent blur nor is it competing with the foreground actors for your attention. So then you started to see a trend of filmmakers gravitate back towards a more moderate middle ground of seeing depth of field as a creative storytelling tool.

One reason why I like micro four thirds for video work is the ability to shoot at f2.8 but get the same depth of field as f5.6 on full frame, allowing me to keep ISO lower but maintain a certain amount of depth of field.

For the same reason, I tend to shoot full frame video at f4 because it more closely approximates the depth of field in many feature movies. The 'cinematic' trend of YouTubers and micro budget film makers shooting everything wide open on fast lenses is a bit annoying, because 'cinematic' has become popularly synonymous with shallow depth of field, and not an emulation of big budget cinema, as it should be.

In more specialized situations, I try to choose any given f stop based on focal length, distance to subject, desired effect/mood, lighting conditions, etc. Much of my video work revolves around documentary/reportage, so I can't rely on deliberate lighting unless I have time and opportunity.

Having said that, for photography, I'm all about shooting lenses wide open in moderate to low light, especially the Summicron 50, Distagon 35/1.4, even the Zeiss f2.8 wides. When the scene is bright daylight, I'll stop down to f5.6 or f8 so most things are in focus.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Most photos just don't look good shot with fast lenses wide open. Especially 50mm and longer lenses; the depth of field is measured in fractions of an inch and leaves too much out of focus. People often want portraits to have out of focus backgrounds, but even then you get far better results using something like f5.6 because that'll ensure that the whole face is sharp while still leaving the background soft.

I've only done a handful of photos at very wide aperture that worked well, like this one:

This was shot with an Olympus 50mm f1.4 on 35mm film. Even for that, I stopped down to f2.8

 

[nikon_sam]

Yashica ML 50mm 1.4 @ 1.4

Nikkor AF 85mm 1.4D @ 1.4

When shooting wide open I find it really helps using a tripod...