Depth of Field in Cinematography

Depth of Field in Cinematography

In today's blog we will be learning about depth of field in cinematography. Depth of Field is another word for focus. The focus of the screen. This can be used to tell a story, emotion and etc. The ways to do it is through: Deep, Shallow Soft Focus, Rack and Tilt Shift. Deep focus is when the entire screen is in focus. Shallow focus is when one specific area is in focus usually the middle ground of the screen. Soft focus is used for more of reality changes dreamy and blurs and makes information harder to see. All are used to show/convey conflict, character and/or development. There are others but they are harder to do with pictures/stills.

Depth of field in film:

The Incredibles 2 (2018) uses a deep focus shot. This is to show unity. Allows the expressions to be all shown. 

John Wick Chapter: 4 (2023) uses shallow focus for the still. This scene uses this to show isolation and sorrow 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) use soft focus to convey one a memory scene and creates a scene with conflict not everything is like it seems. This shot also uses shallow focus.

My attempts at Depth of Field:

This is a basic deep focus shot. Everything can be seen the setting and what the characters are currently doing. To only develop peace.

The still uses a shallow focus with the focus on the character in the back to create emphasis on this character. Since he is behind someone this make you feel like something nefarious is happening. 

This still that I made uses a soft focus shot with a tilted angle to make the entire scene unbalanced. This shows something is wrong. In this example.

Personal Problems with Learning Depth of Feild:

The main problems with making the photos were identifying how to make the photos to begin with. The definitions were illuding me. With thinking the reverse with deep and shallow depth of view. My thought process was that shallow view is something without a focus an over-all screen. This was the reverse for the deep view at first. But after further research and asking around, I found out that I was mistaken. 

After learning what exactly each type of depth of field (deep, soft and shallow), I now had to practically do the prosses. This is where I also took a while to learn. The phone wasn't giving the shallow blur effect I wanted for the shot. I went to Google to ask how to create this "shallow blur" using an android: You want to zoom in more than needed and get close to another target or object then see if it blurs. If it does, then hope the other object is in focus and bravo. You got a shallow shot.

Back to the topic at hand, the deep shot was the only other shot with nothing fancy to alter and do just have to pose them and make it look pretty. Just a photo.

The next type of depth is soft focus. This was the hardest to do in my opinion. The reason for this was a simply the know-how. The way it was created originally was either Vaseline or skin tights put on and around the camera to blur the image. There are filters but I wanted to stay practical. To find something similar around my home was hard until I found an old curtain that was very see through. That is how you got the photos above.

It was easy after solving that.