Out of focus foregrounds

Dealing with Out of Focus Foregrounds

If out of focus foregrounds don’t bother you, then this article won’t be relevant to your photography. However, I find them to be terribly distracting. When foreground elements are soft in front of a sharp subject, our eye is constantly diverted away from that subject to the blurred parts of the image, trying to focus on them. That usually ruins the photograph.

A clear case in point is the portrait of a wolf, below. The out of focus background is fine. Because the forest behind the wolf is so undefined, that forces our attention on the subject. However, look at the tree. It is blurred just enough to be visually annoying. I used a Canon 300mm f/2.8 lens for the shot, and the lens aperture was set to f/4.5. This relatively large f/stop was perfect to blur the background, but the shallow depth of field made the tree too soft for this to be considered (at least by me) a successful picture.

Now study the image on the next page. The

tree is sharp as it should be, the background is still complimentarily soft, and the wolf is still tack sharp. This is ideal.

How did I do this? Once I realized the depth of field problem, I focused on the tree and took a second shot. I disregarded the rest of the picture, including the wolf, because I needed that one element sharp.

Later, when I got home from this wildlife workshop, I made a precise selection of the sharp tree trunk using the pen tool and then pasted that over the out of focus trunk in the wolf picture. That gave me the perfect combination of a sharp foreground element with an undefined blurred background.

In this type of composition, it is easy to assume the tree will be sharp even with a large lens aperture because it is up against the wolf. However, since I was using a telephoto, the depth of field was particularly shallow. The diameter of the tree trunk was about eight inches, but with a 300mm lens that depth was enough to blur the tree when I focused on the wolf. Using a smaller aperture wasn’t an option because 1) I wanted the background to be significantly out of of focus, and the smaller f/stop would bring more definition to the forest behind the wolf, and 2) closing the lens down more would mean the shutter speed would be slower. With fast moving animals like canines, a fast shutter is essential for sharp pictures.

I used the same technique when I photographed a mother and baby chimpanze shown on the next page. I took this at the Jane Goodall center in Kenya. I was separated from the chimps by electrified wire, and when I lay on the ground, a large female came and sat down in front of me with her baby. We were separated by about

three feet. I put a 70-200mm telephoto on my camera along with an extension tube to enable me to focus at this distance. The depth of field was extremely shallow, so as I focused on the eyes of the baby, the mother’s comforting and protective hand was out of focus.

I took this in 2007 when I was shooting with Canon’s first serious digital camera, the 1Ds Mark II. A high ISO at this time meant unwanted noise, and if the ISO rose above 1000, the pictures were essentially unusable. Therefore, I set my ISO to 320. In this lowlight situation, that meant my settings were 1/125 and f/2.8. With such a large aperture, there was no way I could hold focus on the eyes as well as the mother’s hand. As you can see from the image below left, the original out of focus hand is distracting and very unappealing. It ruins an otherwise good picture.

To solve the problem, I quickly took two shots before the mother moved her hand. With the second exposure I photographed the hand, and then in Photoshop, when I returned home, I made a careful selection of the sharp version of the hand and pasted that over the blurred hand in the original capture.

The picture shown below right is what I saw. Since we never see out of focus elements with our eyes (notwithstanding the need for glasses or contact lenses), this kind of Photoshop manipulation brings a subject or scene from nonreality to reality. At the same time, it eliminates a vexing problem in photography. §

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