From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Understanding depth of field

Understanding depth of field

From the course: Digital Media Foundations

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Understanding depth of field

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- When cameras focus, light from the subject shines through the lens where it's focused on the photo-sensor in a digital camera or the film surface in an old-style film camera. In either case, there's a minimum grain size. In the case of film, that grain size would be the particles of light-reacting dye. In the case of a digital camera, it's a single photoreceptor. When a single point of light lands perfectly within a photoreceptor, it's in focus. When it doesn't, it's not. It's as simple as that. But what if that single point of light could be even more in focus than a single photoreceptor? Well, in that case it could never look any more in focus than a single photoreceptor and it would look exactly as sharp as it did before, and that's depth of field. When you focus a lens there's actually a range of focal distances that are as sharp as the light sensor can see. When you open up the lens by using a lower F-Stop or T-Stop you widen the area the light is shone onto on the sensor…

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