On Depth of Focus, DU, and Politics - Democratic Underground

MineralMan

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Fri Aug-20-10 11:24 AM
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On Depth of Focus, DU, and Politics

Edited on Fri Aug-20-10 11:38 AM by MineralMan

As part of my work writing articles for woodworking and home repair magazines, I was forced to learn photography, since I also had to illustrate those articles with countless photos of finished products and step-by-step photos. So, I taught myself photography at a professional level, and got quite good at it, with a number of magazine covers for various magazines in my portfolio.

A key factor in photography is a concept called "Depth of Focus." While this has changed somewhat in the age of digital photography, for film photographers it was always a key issue. Here's how it works. When you focus a camera lens, there is a range of distances where the image is in sharp enough focus to appear to be clear to the viewer. There are many variables that go into that depth of focus, including lens type, f-stop, and other issues. But this isn't a photography lesson, so I won't bore you.

Depth of Focus is most apparent in close-up photography. When you're focused on a very near subject, the depth of focus encompasses a very, very small range of distance. Everything not in that range becomes blurry and lacks detail. Often, that can be used to narrow the viewer's attention on the thing you want them to look at, with the background obscured into a blurry image with no details. At other times, it limits what you can show in the image in a way that's not productive, since some things the viewer needs to see will be too blurry. So, it was always a huge issue in every close-up shot and even sometimes in longer shots.

Politics is somewhat similar. If we move very close to a detailed issue in the vast array of issues, only the particular issue we are focused on is sharp, clear, and well-defined. Everything else is blurred and hard to distinguish. As with close-up photography, the background can become blurred and unnoticed. This can lead to our seeing only the thing we are focused on and to our ignoring of everything else in the picture. Sometimes that's what you want, but other times, it's unproductive and interferes with your presentation.

In photography, the simplest solution to putting more of the image in focus is to move the camera further away from the subject...to back up. Either that, or the photographer can use a wide-angle lens, which has a longer range of depth of focus. In either case, you can move or change so that more of the image is in focus and can be viewed clearly by the intended audience.

Again, a similar effect works in politics. If the overall view is blurred, but a single, close part of the image is in focus, we can back off a bit, increasing the depth of focus and showing more of the overall image clearly and sharply. Or, we can take a wider view, like using a wide-angle lens, to get the same effect.

It seems to me that a lot of people right now are in too close, focused tightly on a single part of the image, to the extent that the rest of the image becomes obscure and unclear. Maybe, it's time to think about stepping farther away from that detail or using a wider view, so that we can see how the detail fits into the rest of the picture. Maybe a longer view is just what's needed.