by Paul Morley

Created on: July 30, 2009

Controlling depth of field in your photographs will dramatically increase the quality of your images and give them that professional look. Depth of field in photography refers to the part of an image that appears sharp in a photograph. Manipulating the depth of field when you take photograph is a useful skill to learn. For example, portraits often benefit from a narrow depth of field when the subject is in sharp focus but all of the distracting background elements appear blurred or out of focus. Landscape images on the other hand, often benefit from having everything from the front to the back of the scene in focus.

When you are trying to lean the relationships between factors that affect depth of field, there's nothing more guaranteed to confuse you than an in depth tutorial and on most occasions, people who write about this topic like to use it as an opportunity demonstrate their vast technical knowledge. Unfortunately, this serves more to confuse the reader rather than help them understand.

Does the thought of juggling the following formulae put you off completely? You'll be pleased to know you can skip this part completely and adopt a much simpler and more realistic approach with 3 simple rules..

H=(f x f/Nc)+f

and

Dn=s(H-f)/(H+s-2f)

and

Df=s(H-f)/(H-s)

The above formulae may be great fun to play with in the comfort of your own home (or maybe not). But they are hardly practical when you are out in the field with your camera looking at the next great masterpiece and trying to decide what settings to use on your camera. If you are the sort of person that likes to take calculators and laptops with spreadsheet software in your camera bag then this tutorial may not be for you. Otherwise read on.

What factors affect depth of field and how?

Since a lot of people are now using digital cameras that have the ability to instantly playback and zoom in on the image you've just taken, it is possible to get a pretty good estimate of the depth of field or zone of acceptable sharpness in your image. The first step is to take your picture and look at it on your camera to see how it looks. Once you have established that, if you want more or less depth of field, there are quick and simple steps you can take.

Aperture or f-number.

The aperture is actually the size of the hole in the lens that determines how much light reaches the sensor or film plane.
* The smaller the aperture, the greater the depth of field you get in your image.

It is important to remember that due to the way the

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