Depth-Of-Field Examples

This morning, as usual, I took Molly out for our morning walk to Maple Leaf Park. While pausing for a few moments out of the rain in one of the park’s dugouts I decided to do something I had been meaning to for some time.

The following photos illustrate how changing your camera’s lens aperture affects the depth-of-field of an image. Each photo was taken with my ‘Canon’ EOS R and the ‘Canon’ EF 35mm f/1.8 Macro lens. All are shot at ISO 200 in aperture priority mode so that each time I stopped down a setting the camera automatically adjusted the shutter speed to account for the reduction in light.

These are the same image taken with the same focus point (the surface of the dugout bench about 36” in front of the camera. Only the aperture changes in each.

As you will see the clear area of focus grows out from the focus point with each stop down (reduction in aperture size) until, at the smallest aperture, almost all of the seat is clear. Had I started the image series with the focus point further out the clear focus area would have grown similarly with each setting change with the final f/22 image capturing more foreground and more background clearly.