The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

SELECTIVE

Young maple, Tokyo, 2001

Shallow depth of field gives selective focus, which means pointing the viewer to exactly what you want them to see, because our eyes cannot help but drift toward whatever is sharp. The wider the aperture, the more selective the focus, and this is where fast lenses come into their own. The aperture here is ƒ/1.4, and with a subject that goes deep away from the camera, like this young maple tree, most of the image will be blurred to one degree or another. This is is optical blur (forget boke/bokeh for now, which is Japanese for blur and typically used to describe the subjective quality of blur rather than the objective ...