The lens I generally photograph with has a very wide aperture at its largest. What this does is it creates a shallow depth of field. And if you also don’t know what that means, it means that it causes objects to be very blurry when they are not the point of focus. In this photograph, the Spotted Towhee’s eyes are the point of focus. Therefore, anything closer to my lens or farther away from the eyes of the Towhee become blurry. The farther objects are from the focus point, the more blurry they become.

You can see in this photograph that the far background is mostly gray tones. Everything is so blurry that it all kind of blends together back there. That creates a big separation between the far background and the stuff that is closer like the leaves and branches near the bird. I’ve never taken a photograph before that looks quite like this one nor do I recall ever seeing a photograph like this one. The coloring, the separation, and the twiggy branches give this particular photograph a moody feel to me.

You may have thought I was going to talk about the Spotted Towhee’s action in this photograph as it leaps off of its perch, but instead I hope you enjoyed the lesson about depth of field.

BAM☺︎