Deep focus

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Image:Best Years of Our Lives 01 bar.jpg
A scene from William Wyler's film The Best Years of Our Lives exemplifies deep focus. Note the in-focus figure in the phone booth in the background — best seen in the enlarged view of the image.
Image:Rules of the Game 09 kitchen.jpg
A scene from Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game exemplifies shallow focus. Note the out-of-focus figure in the background — best seen in the enlarged view of the image.

Deep focus is a photographic and cinematographic technique incorporating a large depth-of-field. Depth-of-field is the front-to-back range of focus in an image — that is, how much of it appears sharp and clear. Consequently, in deep focus the foreground, middle-ground and background are all in focus. This can be achieved through knowledgeable application of the hyperfocal distance of the camera lens being used.

The opposite of deep focus is shallow focus, in which only one plane of the image is in focus.

In the cinema, Orson Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland were the two individuals most responsible for popularizing deep focus. Their film Citizen Kane (1941) is a veritable textbook of possible uses of the technique.

Contents

[edit] Notable uses of deep focus

The following films and television programs contain notable examples of deep-focus photography:

[edit] Black and White

[edit] Color

[edit] See also

[edit] References

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