244 CHAPTER 6 ERASING AND TOUCHING UP DEPTH OF FIELD The visual property that makes closer objects stand out is related to an effect photographers call depth of field. Some cameras let you control the aperture of the lens, or how wide open it is. The F-stop is related to the aperture: the bigger the F-stop, the smaller the aperture. At an F-stop of F/2.8, a lens is fairly wide open, whereas at F/11, most of the opening has been closed off, as shown in the figure. The curious division notation used, F/number, is actually somewhat descriptive. It s the result of dividing the focal distance of the lens by the current aperture diameter. A wide open lens lets in a lot of light, so you can take photos in dimly lit rooms or with fast shutter speeds; but the larger the aperture of the lens, the smaller is its depth of field. Depth of field is the range of distances that are in focus. If your subject is a person five feet away from the camera, the photo might actually have good focus for everything from three feet away to the mountains in the distance ( infinity ) a large depth of field. Alternately, if the depth of field is very small, perhaps only the range from 4′11″ to 5′3″ away will be in focus the person s nose may be in focus while his ears might not be! Wouldn t having everything in focus be a good thing? In fact, it s often useful to have a shallow depth of field. If your subject is the only object in focus, then the eye is naturally drawn to that subject and away from the rest of the photograph. Looking back at the meerkats, the original Figure 6-24 shows a large depth of field: both meerkats are in sharp focus. The modified Figure 6-25 simulates the effect of a shallow depth of field: only one meerkat is in focus, and the other one is blurry. One problem: the photo now looks somewhat strange, because the background meerkat is fuzzy while the wall behind him is sharp. In the section Blurring Backgrounds with Gaussian Blur, you ll see a better way of simulating a shallow depth of field over a wider area. Large aperture (small F-stop number) means that more light is coming through the lens, but the depth of field will be smaller.
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