Touchpoints

I like the shallow depth of field.

— Greg Molyneux (@gregmolyneux) July 12, 2015

It was just this past Sunday I dropped such deep knowledge on the Twitters. Insert very strong sarcasm. Flippancy aside I really do like the shallow depth of field. Recognizing its existence was for me revelatory. As someone who spent the better part of 30 years willfully ignorant toward anything photographic, seeing exposures for the first time elevated composition to a new plane of understanding in my sometime left dominant brain. More so, it shed light into why, despite being rather skilled with any kind of fine art pencil work, I could never grasp the nuance and subtleties of painting—I’m especially looking at you, oils. I never understood depth of field. I never saw it. It’s as simple as that. I never understood you could just blur out elements, whether in the fore, mid or back grounds, with purpose to better move the eye across your subject and through its story.

Art, man. It sounds so simple in retrospect. But I really do like the shallow depth of field.