The Art of Composition part 2
Part of the challenge in writing about the art of composition is simply deciding where to begin. Naturally, this is a big topic. It’s an important topic. Photography is visual art and therefore everything in the photograph is, in some way, connected to this concept. How we use light, where shadows fall, what we choose to include and exclude, how we order the things we are including within the picture space, and where the subject falls in juxtaposition with all of this are just a few examples.
But we do have to begin somewhere.
Before we can talk about all the “stuff” in a photograph, the trees, the rocks, the shadows, the lines, the esoteric concepts of golden ratios, and all of that, maybe the best place to start is a discussion about how we go about including or excluding all that stuff to begin with.
I could say we are going to begin by talking about depth of field, but words are a funny thing. On workshops, when I talk about depth of field, people tend to glaze over. But when reframed as bokeh, as those creamy out of focus backgrounds wildlife photographers love so much, it’s a different story.
Yet, bokeh is not the same as depth of field (DOF), even though bokeh is created by depth of field.
Confused?
Not to worry, this is exactly why I mention it. And this is exactly why I believe depth of field is a natural beginning for us wildlife photographers.
But before we begin, definitions are in order. So let’s get this out of the way right from the beginning: depth of field (DOF) is the zone of what appears to be in acceptable focus within a photograph.
In the simplest of terms possible. . .
The greater the depth of field, the “more that is in focus.”
The shallower the depth of field is, the “less that is in focus.”
The reason I feel this is an important starting point is simply because we cannot always pick and choose exactly what is going to be inside of our composition. This isn’t like painting, where we sit down to a blank canvas and make the decision that a rock will go here, and a “happy little tree” will go over there. Nature, more often than not, is chaos. The various things that surround our subjects is a swirling vortex of entropy. And as wildlife photographers, as artists, it is our job to create order out of this chaos.
If you don’t know the word “entropy,” it’s a scientific term relating to the measurable degree of randomness and, well, chaos.
It’s for this reason that depth of field becomes important. No amount of understanding things like the elements of design is going to help unless we understand how to try and control that which is uncontrollable.
When we think of depth of field, the most important thing to understand is that it’s completely dependent upon distance.
If you are reading this, you most likely understand that a lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.8 can produce a shallower depth of field than a lens that is f/5.6.
But what you might not know is that f/5.6, or even f/8 for that matter, can produce the same look and feel and creamy bokeh of f/2.8, if you want it to.
How? Why?
It’s all about distance.
Think of Depth of Field as a bubble around your subject. What falls within this bubble will appear to be in focus. What falls outside of this bubble will appear to more and more out of focus the further it is away from that bubble.
Often, photographers place all of the emphasis on the background. The farther away the background is from the subject, the softer it will be, the more out-of-focus it will appear.
However, equally as important to the distance of the background, and often even more important in my opinion, is HOW CLOSE YOU ARE TO YOUR SUBJECT because this is what dictates the size of that bubble to begin with.
Therefore, the closer to a subject you are, the shallower the depth of field will be at a given aperture. The shallower the DOF, the more isolated your subject is from the competing details in the environment, the creamier the backgrounds, the more the subject stands out.
When we measure depth of field, it's important to remember that what falls within the bubble is what appears to be perfectly in focus. But what appears to be in focus versus out of focus is not a hard line. There is a gradient in which the illusion of focus and the subsequent details that can be seen falls off the further you get from that bubble around the subject.
Examples. . .
Let's say I'm sitting in my kayak photographing oystercatchers and I'm using a 400mm lens at f/2.8 lens. Kayaks are a wonderful tool for wildlife photography. I wrote a feature article in the Summer 2023 issue of PhotoWILD Magazine talking all about this. And because I'm in a kayak, I'm able to work my way in very close to this otherwise very weary bird to a distance of 15 feet.
With a 400mm lens (yes that matters) set at this aperture, if I focus on an oystercatcher sitting 15 feet away, the depth of field will be 0.07 feet. This is 0.84 inches, literally less than one inch. This means that the bubble of what appears to in focus will only an area a less than an inch in size. This is very narrow. This means my focus needs to be deadly accurate. Outside of this 1 inch diameter bubble, the focus falls off very fast.
If I were to increase the distance between me and my subject, everything changes. Let’s say I'm in Montana and I am focusing on a subject that is 100 yards/meters away. Of course this subject will be significantly larger than an oystercatcher. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s an elk at the edge of the forest.
The distance from me to the elk may seem ridiculous (and I agree with that). However, this is something I see on a regular basis from many photographers in the field — especially those wielding high-resolution sensors who like to “crop in” on their subjects.
At 100 yards, with a 400mm lens at f/2.8, we are looking at a depth of field of 30 feet.
This means that anything falling within a 30-foot bubble around our subject will appear just as in focus as the subject itself. Every tree, every branch, stick, rock, clump of grass, other animals, EVERYTHING within this bubble will be in focus.
And this is at f/2.8.
It can be much worse.
Today, telephoto zoom lenses are all the rage and far more common in the field than big heavy primes like a 400 or 600mm. These zooms come with variable apertures, meaning the maximum aperture changes with the focal length you are using. For the Sony 200-600 and Nikon 180-600, the maximum aperture is f/6.3. With the Canon 100-500, the maximum aperture is f/7.1.
Here's the gut punch. . .
With the above example of the elk at 100 yards away, if we were to use f/6.3, our depth of field would be close to 70 feet!
If we were to use f/7.1, the DOF would be around 75 feet.
I don’t know about you, but 70+ feet is a very big area for me to have everything in focus. The is landscape photography territory. And that means I will have to be hypersensitive of every single thing in the composition at all times to even come closed to making that situation work.
This is why distance is everything.
Distance from the lens to the subject and distance from the subject to the background.
More often than not, with wildlife photography especially, we want our subjects to pop out from the rest of the composition. This is why we tend to obsess over depth of field and bokeh. It allows us to bring the subject to the immediate attention of the viewer instead of being lost to the entropy of the environment. Given the extraordinarily short attention spans of most people in industrialized nations nowadays, we typically have only a fraction of a second to capture that attention when they look at a photograph.
Whether you're an amateur photographer doing all of this for the love of the craft, or a professional trying to sell your photographs, you must convey enough information for someone to understand what is happening in your photographs within only a fraction of a second.
Consider how someone looks at photos on Facebook. Viewing all those photos on a mobile device as most do, people see only a small version of the photos as they whiz by at a seemingly blinding speed. And then occasionally, some bit of information their brains processed within a nanosecond stops them in their tracks and they invest their eight seconds of attention on that photograph.
The same goes for selling photographs to magazines. There was a time when great photographs of wildlife were rare commodities. Today, however, thanks to the democratization of photography due to the advent of digital technology, editors are completely overwhelmed with extraordinary photographs. Whether an editor is culling through potential photos for an article they have sitting in a folder, or, worse yet, they are scrolling through images on a stock photography website, oftentimes they are trying to choose just 10 or 15 photographs out of many thousands. And so they often employ the exact same technique as a Facebook user scrolling through their newsfeed.
So, why is all that relevant to you?
If you are unable to make your subject stand out from its environment so that it’s INSTANTLY recognizable, then you will always fail to grab people’s attention long enough for them to even look at your work.
This is why we working photographers obsess over bokeh, depth of field, and “fast lenses.” And this is part of the reason that we are willing to make huge financial sacrifices to have lenses like a 400mm f/2.8 or a 600mm f/4. Despite the extraordinary weight and crazy price tags, these lenses give us the ability to make our subjects “pop” in situations that are simply not possible with more affordable pieces of glass like a 200-600, 180-600, or 100-500mm lens.
But as I mentioned above, this doesn’t mean that you cannot make your subject pop with these other lenses. It doesn’t mean you can’t create a similar look and feel and bokeh-licious background as an f/2.8 lens. Did I really just say bokeh-vicious? It just means that you will have to be much more precise with how you photograph the subject. And one of the best ways of looking at all of this is from the perspective of “distance.”
Let's circle back to the oystercatchers. Only this time the situation is birds in flight and the examples are not hypothetical.
With the two photographs below, both of these are flight shots. Neither photograph exceptional in any way. They are both run-of-the-mill stock photos from my library. Cliché. Trite. They will never end up on the wall in someone’s home. But they do sell as stock photos, and they serve well to illustrate what I am trying to convey here.
Looking at the two images, can you tell which one was created using an f/2.8 and which one using f/8?
Thinking of DOF and bokeh only in terms of aperture, it would be easy to assume the first photograph is the f/2.8 example, and the image of the bird landing on the oysters was shot at f/8.
But that's not the case.
I was at roughly the same distance for each of these photographs which was maybe 50 feet. Both were shot with the same lens.
But even though the image made at f/8 should have a significantly larger depth of field than the one created at f/2.8, it's that photograph whose background is the softest and the creamiest. And that's because of how far away from the DOF bubble the background was.
With the other photo of the oystercatcher landing, even though the DOF bubble is considerably smaller, the background was closer to that bubble. And for this reason, there is significantly more detail in that background. And not just any detail, I might add. The salt-marsh cordgrass in the background is full of vertical lines and those lines can be intensely distracting. Imagine if the background was closer or if I had photographed this at f/6.3; imagine how much more detail would be there, how much stronger those lines would be, how much more distracting it would be.
Line is the first tenet of the Elements of Design, which I will be discussing in detail inside this series. But by understanding depth of field and how that we can set ourselves up for success by using nuances of the equipment in our hands to help include or exclude such details is why we are starting with this topic first.
Distance.
Even if you use an f/5.6 or f/6.3 lens, you can still achieve the creamy bokeh that most of us are searching for – as the two images of the oystercatchers shows. But because of the increased depth of field with these smaller apertures, understanding exactly how DOF works, how it relates to your lens, and how to approach your subject with DOF in mind, becomes an absolutely crucial skill set to be successful.