Landscape Photography with a Shallow Depth of Field

As a landscape photographer, you have many different ways to control the emotional message of your work. The time of day, your focal length, the direction you face, how you edit the image, and so on – all of these impact the creative feel of a photo. But what about depth of field?

Usually, landscape photographers are conditioned to aim for maximum depth of field, perhaps not even considering it as a creative element under your control. I’ll be the first to admit that I often talk about apertures like f/8, f/11, and f/16 as “landscape apertures.” But that’s a simplification. Today, I want to highlight the other side of things – the potential of shallow depth of field in landscape photography – and offer some thoughts on how it ties into creative photography.

Historically, landscape photography wasn’t always about getting everything in focus from front to back. For many early years, soft-focus pictorialism prevailed. Although Ansel Adams deserves some credit for ushering in a newer, sharper approach, the tides were already changing before his time. Most likely, realism was destined to win out no matter what.

Today, of course, portrait and wildlife photographers are the ones who most often shoot with a shallow depth of field, while landscape photographers generally aim for maximum detail across the frame. But why do those guys get to have all the fun? Landscape photographers shouldn’t be afraid to claim what they used to love. It reminds me of when U2 covered Helter Skelter –

“This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back!”

(In this metaphor, Charles Manson represents portrait and wildlife photographers, while U2 and the Beatles represent landscape photographers.)

Landscape photos with a shallow depth of field can be very powerful. When elements of the scene are out of focus, more attention falls on your subject – that’s true of landscapes just as much as portraiture or any other genre. Likewise, out-of-focus regions can eliminate distractions and even add a sense of mystery to your photo that wouldn’t be easy to accomplish another way.

If you think of landscape photography as a straightforward document of the scene in front of you, maybe playing around with depth of field won’t strike you as appealing. But if you view landscape photography as an art form, where you express your creative perspective on the world, it could be a different story. In that case, it’s wise to question the popular trends of the day – currently, that includes ultra-wide angles, high saturation, high dynamic range, maximum sharpness – and reject anything that doesn’t fit with your vision.

Fans of Ansel Adams (including me) may be hesitant to embrace a style of photography that he didn’t like. But another way to consider it is this: Ansel Adams carefully considered the prevailing trends and rejected pictorialism as unrepresentative of how he saw the world. Don’t be afraid to follow in those footsteps and approach landscape photography how it suits you.

This isn’t a suggestion to abandon realism and take all your landscape photos in an abstract or soft-focus manner. There’s a lot of merit in sharp, realistic landscape photos that transport the viewer into the scene. Regardless of the topic of this article, there’s no way that I’ll take a majority of my landscape photos with a shallow depth of field any time soon.

But the question is whether every landscape is best captured with front-to-back sharpness. At least for how I see the world, the answer is no. Shallow focus can bring out the subtleties of some landscapes in a way that elevates the photo and lets you tell a more effective story. If nothing else, it’s a useful tool to have in your back pocket.

How do you put a shallow depth of field into practice as a landscape photographer? From a technical standpoint, there are no surprises: Get closer to your subject, use a wider aperture, or use a longer lens. It’s the same three things as always.

From an artistic standpoint, however, the question is more interesting. Shallow depth of field isn’t an on/off switch, where a photo either has it or doesn’t. You could shoot at f/1.2 to blow out everything around your subject, but you could also use an aperture of f/4 or f/5.6 to give a more subtle out-of-focus impression to the background. There are different degrees of shallow depth of field available, and depending upon how far you go, you’ll change the artistic direction of the photo.

For the photo below, I knew that I wanted the distant background to be slightly out of focus. (To achieve this, my settings were akin to a 105mm lens at f/8 on full-frame.) I didn’t want the background to be excessively blurry, but I felt that it would look better as a slight blend of colors – less distracting, and with a greater impression of distance.

At the small size that you’re viewing the image online, it may be difficult to notice the effect. But the crop afterwards should demonstrate the subtle, yet valuable contribution to the photo achieved by the slightly out-of-focus background.

If you want a shallow depth of field, one of the tricky things about landscape photography is that, unlike portraiture, your subject is often quite far away. From a technical standpoint, this can make it more difficult to get a shallow depth of field. Yet, I find that the landscapes which benefit the most from a shallow depth of field are often the ones where it is easiest to achieve.

You’ll see that most of the photos in this article are intimate landscapes, or at least scenes with a nearby foreground. In these sorts of landscapes, it’s pretty easy to achieve a blurry background if that’s what you want, and it also tends to look more natural.

The key is to apply a shallow depth of field in such a way that the photo benefits from it. You can turn any landscape into a blurry wash with the right tools – things like a tilt-shift lens, a soft-focus lens, or a Brenizer method panorama. But not every scene will look better that way. It’s best to use this technique in a way that highlights the character of the landscape, while corresponding to your personal, creative approach to seeing the world.

One of the worst things you could do as an artist is to exchange your innate personal style for whatever trends are prevailing at the moment. You’ll be more satisfied if you see photography as a way to express yourself, and that means not making any assumptions about how you “should” photograph something – including, in this case, whether landscape photos need to be sharp from front to back.

I hope that this article gave you a good introduction to the possibilities of shallow depth of field in landscape photography. If it’s something that you hadn’t considered before, you should give it a try. Maybe you’ll love it, or maybe you’ll find that it’s not your style. Either way, it’s useful to figure that out for yourself.