depth of field was an issue. This was especially
true because the tall grasses were just a few feet
away from the camera position.
There are two approaches to a picture like this.
I could render the grass as sharp as possible
with an emphasis on detail, or I could shoot
wide open so the leopard would be sharp while
the grasses were blurred. I decided to go for the
detail. This was possible (with a relatively low
ISO) because the sun brightly illuminated the
scene. Therefore, I used a lens aperture of f/16.
My other settings were: shutter speed 1/
and the ISO was set to 1000.
Notice that the lower middle portion of the im-
age shows the grasses somewhat out of focus.
This occurred because those elements were
simply too close to the camera to be rendered
sharp, even at f/16. Had I used f/32, they also
wouldn’t have been seen as tack sharp. Only
had I zoomed back to a wider focal length, such
as 24mm or even 35mm, would the grass infront of the cat be sharp.
Notice also the background. It’s out of focus
because, when I focused on the relatively close
subject, the distant elements in the backgroundwere too far to be included in the field of focus.
Real world DOF scenario #
The picture on the next page of a tulip I pho-
tographed in spectacular Keukenhof Gardens
in Holland is an example of where I specifically
wanted depth of field as shallow as possible. I
wanted the flower to stand out while being sur-
rounded -- not by out of focus flowers -- but bya blur of color. In other words, I wanted the ad-
jacent flowers to be so out of focus they would
be virtually unidentifiable. My intension was
the color blur would act as a frame for the sub-