How to Create Depth of Field
Hey everyone! My name is Adrienne - I’m so glad you’re here! Today I’m going to be talking about how to get a blurry background, also known as depth of field.
Now I know you’ve seen other YouTubers who have a blurry background, maybe you’ve seen it in photography. I know it’s really easy to do on our smartphone cameras now. You just swipe over to portrait mode and it does things for you. But today we’re going to be talking about how you can create that effect using your own camera.
But how do we create that effect?
And what even is depth of field, really? Depth of field is the range of distance that is in focus in the image. Your image has a foreground, what is in focus (your subject), and a background. Depth of field travels along that z-axis, back into your image, and it’s referencing the distance of what is in focus
I think it can be a good idea to have a shallow depth of field. How shallow is really up to you. But it’s a good idea because it tells your audience exactly what to look at. So they’re going to be focusing on the subject of the image - exactly what you want them to be seeing without you having to tell them to not get distracted by other things in the frame
The 2 things you can manipulate on your camera to create depth of field are aperture and focal length.
The 2 questions you want to ask yourself are:
How low can I get my aperture?
How long can i make my lens?
When it comes to aperture, it might be helpful for you to think about how our eyes work. When you have a lot of light, your pupil gets really small. Conversely when there isn’t a lot of light your pupil gets really big.
The aperture in your camera works the same way. When you are in a low light setting, like inside, you’re going to want to open up that aperture really wide. And when you are, say, outside, and it’s the middle of the day with full sun, you want to close the aperture down really small.
Your aperture is measured in f-stops. The bigger the aperture, the lowers the f-stop number. The smaller the aperture, the higher the f-stop number.
So to achieve a shallow depth of field, you want a low f-stop - you want your aperture to be big and wide open.
The other thing you want to think about is focal length - the length of your lens. A wide angle lens is going to keep everything in focus, whereas if you zoom in closer to say, 50mm, 85mm, or even higher than that, you will start to achieve some shallow depth of field.
The last thing you need to think about when you’re setting up your shot has nothing to do with your camera. If you want your background to be blurry to any degree, you cannot be sitting right up against it. You need to have space between yourself and the background.
My regular filming location gives me about 5 feet of space between myself and the wall. If I could I’d have more, but the room I record in just doesn’t allow for that. But 5 feet of space gets me a background that’s a little bit blurry. And so you spend the whole video focusing on me and the words that I’m saying.
You also want to think about this if you’re doing something like an overhead shot. If you have a product sitting on a tabletop and you’re filming overhead, the tabletop is not going to be blurry because your subject is sitting right on top of it.
The only thing I want you to be careful of is … going too shallow in your depth of field. You could turn your f-stop all the way down to an f/1.4, focus on your eyes, and then record yourself. But when you go back and look at your footage you might find that while your eyes are in focus, your nose isn’t! Your aperture was so wide open that there wasn’t enough distance on that z-axis to make sure that your eye AND your nose are both in focus.
Just know that it is possible to go too shallow and you won’t wind up with the image that you want.
Aperture really is one of the most important settings on your camera. It controls the style of your image, it controls the depth of field, it controls how bright your image is. It does a lot of different things.
I’d love for you to practice with your aperture and different f-stops so you can become more confident with it!