"Shallow" Depth of Field

In J210 Unit 1, you’ll hear a great deal about “depth of field.” A short definition of this term is simply the amount of image you have in focus from the “back of the image” to the “front” of the image.

I’m a big fan of a very “shallow” depth of field, which means that only a relatively small and specific part of the overall image is actually in focus, and the rest is blurry.
The blurred part of the image serves two purposes:

1. It can be quite attractive in its own right
2. It tends to “pop” the main point of the picture out towards the viewer.

I think you can see what I mean in the above picture that I took in Trier, Germany, about nine years ago.

Architecture pictures, particularly statues and the like can be quite boring in general, unless you work extra hard to create exactly the feeling you were looking for.