The Elements of Photography, 2nd Edition

Image © Angela Faris Belt, Tree Face, from the series Traces.

APERTURES: FOCUS, LENSES, AND CLARITY

MY PRIMARY PROJECT HAS ALWAYS BEEN IN FINDING WAYS TO MAKE THE VIEWER AWARE OF THEIR OWN ACTIVITY OF LOOKING AT SOMETHING.—UTA BARTH

INTRODUCTION: FOCUS, THE SECOND PHOTOGRAPHIC ELEMENT

Have you ever seen a painting you identified as “photorealistic”? What made it look most like a photograph? A large part of the answer is the quality of focus it depicts. Setting photorealistic paintings apart is that they depict a scene the way a camera sees it, and photographs, no matter how closely they seem to approximate human sight, never depict the world ...