Shooting with shallow DOF

thisisapocalypse

thisisapocalypse

Well-known member
Been watching a lot of films lately as research, and as many have noted, most feature films do not go overboard with shots featuring very shallow depth of field - they are definitely there in certain scenes/shots, but they tend not to make up the bulk of shots in the film.

Last night I rewatched "Jerry Maguire" and immediately noticed that a good 75% of the shots, maybe more, have quite shallow DOF and a bunch of the exteriors (night) were more than likely shot with very, very wide open apertures. It also seems evident that the DP was not a big fan of wide angle lenses, as it has a pretty flat look throughout and it appears that they were shooting with probably 50mm+ lenses a good chunk of the time.

Overall, I don't think the look is particularly great for an entire film, but some of the shots really are beautiful.

I bring this up because so many of us with GH1s are using older manual primes and fast 50mms are very common, and so if you are planning to do a project using moderate focal length fast lenses, it may be worth watching this film because this technique is used very often, and you can see what works, and what doesn't. Overall it works, not the look I'd want doing a feature for the whole film, but you do get a good sense of the way to handle it if you're going that route.

Watch that film, and then A/B it to nearly any other feature (my mind is blanking on a good counterpoint, but I just woke up) and you'll immediately notice what I'm talking about. I think overall this film has a higher % of very shallow, wide open shots than I've seen in any other relatively recent mainstream hollywood film.
 
Thanks for this very interesting post. I think its a very interesting observation, as to which dialogue based romantic, dramatic and/or character driven movies will use the techniques you mentioned. (ie: moderate focal length fast lenses). I think its a powerful way off imitating a natural human rapport, with the focus being directing to characters more than environments & atmospherics. For this, a 50mm 1.4 is particularly effective. Just my immediate thoughts... I'd be very interested for this topic to be explored more on this board.
 
'The fountain' I remember was loaded with shallow DOF. Made me think same lengths. Not many other films I've seen really used it that much, but the fountain looked really good, didn't like the film second watching, couldn't stand it third time. loved it the first time. but aesthetically it's gorgeous, but loaded with shallow depth shots.
 
Some people have said that 3D movies, which seem to need deep DOF for 3D effects, will change the movie aesthetic away from shallow DOF.
 
themartist said:
I dont get any of that...
Click to expand...


Me neither...actually just got back from seeing Avatar. There were a lot of shallow DOF shots, and I have to say that shallow dof + 3d is pretty distracting for me and pulls me completely out of the immersive experience, I felt the shots with deep DOF looked better and more natural in 3d, but all and all to me, it still felt fairly gimmicky and even James Cameron could not resist a few blatant 3d gimmick shots.

Some of the 3d visuals in that film were incredibliy impressive...and some of them were not, felt a little inconsistent to me - did not care for it, I'm sort of curious about seeing it in non-3d, I just couldn't get into the film in 3d as I was so distracted by it.
 
thisisapocalypse said:
Me neither...actually just got back from seeing Avatar. There were a lot of shallow DOF shots, and I have to say that shallow dof + 3d is pretty distracting for me and pulls me completely out of the immersive experience, I felt the shots with deep DOF looked better and more natural in 3d, but all and all to me, it still felt fairly gimmicky and even James Cameron could not resist a few blatant 3d gimmick shots.

Some of the 3d visuals in that film were incredibliy impressive...and some of them were not, felt a little inconsistent to me - did not care for it, I'm sort of curious about seeing it in non-3d, I just couldn't get into the film in 3d as I was so distracted by it.
Click to expand...

Well besides that, 3D mimics cameras, FOV's and lenses from the real world... certain lenses have certain uses for particular situations. The wide array of lenses and corresponding apertures are tools for the director to tell his/her story. Specifically regarding DOF... film has more of an influence on animation than vica-versa... and I say this as an animation director who has made the exciting move into film.
 
Funny, just got back from seeing "Up in the Air" and sure enough, another film with lots of shallow DOF shots, but pretty well done I must say.
 
For most shots in a narrative context the trick is not going for shallow DOF but short DOF. Enough to knock off attention from the background without pulling attention to the de-focus itself. One still has to have the actors (and audience) being connected to the place of the piece. A long section of shallow DOF in a edit often has a dislodging effect on the viewers which makes them loose the narrative flow. There is quite a range of DOF between the ultra deep focus of a 1/4" camcorder and the fish-bowl shallowness of a 50mm on a 5DmkII at f/2.0 where only the eyes stay sharp and already the tip of the nose and the ears are beginning to blur.
 
Most movies and t.v. series out there have a well balanced amount of shallow and deep focused shots. The secret is that the pros know how to combine them in the story and come out with an excellent product. The idea that shallow DOF makes a movie is a complete fallacy.
 
It's just one of the many tools for filmmaking. For low budget filmmaking it can be useful to mask a set. So instead of a boring looking shot of a subject sitting in front of a wall you could bring the subject away from the wall, the camera away from the subject, zoom, focus, throw up a couple of Christmas lights in the back and BAM! You have yourself a totally different set with the same location.
 
John Caballero said:
Most movies and t.v. series out there have a well balanced amount of shallow and deep focused shots. The secret is that the pros know how to combine them in the story and come out with an excellent product. The idea that shallow DOF makes a movie is a complete fallacy.
Click to expand...

I completely agree, and should point out that the examples I'm citing are examples of truly shallow DOF, not short DOF, while these films do have both, both also had a very high number of very shallow DOF shots (probably too many), in my opinion. Up in the Air has a bunch of shots where the backgrounds are completely blown into color smear.

I think the reason it's worth noting with these two films (Jerry Maguire and Up in the Air) is that we're not talking about ultra-low-budget productions here where, as another user noted, it can help mask a less attractive set.

If you haven't seen it, check out Up in the Air - a really telling scene is one where Clooney is in the airport Brooks Brothers shop. He is in focus (just barely)as he stands in the middle of the shot, but both the foreground and background get out of focus once you go about an inch forwards or backwards from where he is in the shot, the DOF plane is probably only about 2-3" - it's actually pretty distracting and I can only imagine in this case that it was done because they either couldn't get additional lights in, or liked the way the lighting in the shop looked. I'm actually quite surprised they left the shot the way they did in the film, it's a bit odd and really sticks out if you pay attention to that sort of thing.
 
Last edited:
thisisapocalypse said:
If you haven't seen it, check out Up in the Air - a really telling scene is one where Clooney is in the airport Brooks Brothers shop. He is in focus (just barely)as he stands in the middle of the shot, but both the foreground and background get out of focus once you go about an inch forwards or backwards from where he is in the shot, the DOF plane is probably only about 2-3" - it's actually pretty distracting and I can only imagine in this case that it was done because they either couldn't get additional lights in, or liked the way the lighting in the shop looked. I'm actually quite surprised they left the shot the way they did in the film.
Click to expand...

I did not see the movie yet so my comment may be off base. However in still photography it is quite important to selectively blur certain part of the scene to draw your eyes to the subject of interest. It is quite common to blur both the foreground and background to force you to peek through the "distraction" to better focus on the subject.
 
Against my will, watched "New moon". On close ups, mostly were very shallow depth of field shots... creating a somewhat dreamlike atmosphere. The softness that a blur creates, ties in with everything the word "soft" evokes. Hence the almost romantic quality...
 
I know this topic has been discussed to death in filmmaking forums all over the internet, but it's still fun to debate. :-) I discovered something interesting when I inherited a bunch of American Cinematographer magazines from the 1980's.
What's funny is this: Cinematographers in the '80's were heralding new, faster film stocks because they allowed them to shoot at higher f-stops to get MORE depth-of-field! They wanted MORE in focus. The reason they got such shallow depth-of-field wasn't always artistically related. It's because the film stock was so slow they had to open up the iris to get more light, thus creating shallow depth-of-field. The magazines also include ads by Kodak and Fuji claiming "our new film stock will keep your focus-puller from going insane", or something like that. I read several articles from different DP's who were thrilled they could shoot at t4 or t5.6 instead of t2 or t2.8. Here we are with our GH1's trying to shoot at f1.4!
Anyway, the beauty of shallow depth-of-field is undeniable, but the recent obsession with it is most certainly a fad borne out of 35mm adapters like the Letus and now DSLRs like the 5D and GH1. It can look beautiful, but it can be overused.
And hey, Terry Gilliam, Orson Welles and Sergio Leone, just to name a few directors, shoot almost exclusively in wide-angle, deep-focus. And their movies sure look cool to me.
 
Last edited:
dvbrother said:
I know this topic has been discussed to death in filmmaking forums all over the internet, but it's still fun to debate. :-) I discovered something interesting when I inherited a bunch of American Cinematographer magazines from the 1980's.
What's funny is this: Cinematographers in the '80's were heralding new, faster film stocks because they allowed them to shoot at higher f-stops to get MORE depth-of-field! They wanted MORE in focus. The reason they got such shallow depth-of-field wasn't always artistically related. It's because the film stock was so slow they had to open up the iris to get more light, thus creating shallow depth-of-field. The magazines also include ads by Kodak and Fuji claiming "our new film stock will keep your focus-puller from going insane", or something like that. I read several articles from different DP's who were thrilled they could shoot at t4 or t5.6 instead of t2 or t2.8. Here we are with our GH1's trying to shoot at f1.4!
Anyway, the beauty of shallow depth-of-field is undeniable, but the recent obsession with it is most certainly a fad borne out of 35mm adapters like the Letus and now DSLRs like the 5D and GH1. It can look beautiful, but it can be overused.
And hey, Terry Gilliam, Orson Welles and Sergio Leone, just to name a few directors, shoot almost exclusively in wide-angle, deep-focus. And their movies sure look cool to me.
Click to expand...

Very interesting post. Regardless, all filmmakers will utilize a shallower depth of field than cameras like the dvx100, pd170 or Z1 etc could offer. We then have the beautiful night-shots as well.
 
Woody Allen - frame it up in one wide shot, film the entire scene, move the camera rather than cut. No shallow depth of field shots.
 
D90GH1_eric said:
I did not see the movie yet so my comment may be off base. However in still photography it is quite important to selectively blur certain part of the scene to draw your eyes to the subject of interest. It is quite common to blur both the foreground and background to force you to peek through the "distraction" to better focus on the subject.
Click to expand...

Indeed this is true, but in this particular example it's not well executed. I completely agree with you when it comes to still photography, however while the rules of shot composition apply in the same ways to moving and still images, since you have to watch a bunch of scenes bundled together in a movie, you've got to be conscious of how each scene looks and how it fits into the puzzle of the whole, in which case a mix of shot types when appropriate that flow nicely with each other, in my opinion is ideal and not using a shot for the sake of using a "cool" shot unless you've got a good reason. As a viewer, we shouldn't be distracted by shot changes, they should help move us through the story and be just right for the scene in order to enhance the experience of the story.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top