Why are my photographs so flat?

Pretty, but totally flat, Even the leading lines don’t create a sense of reality

Hello folks. I hear frequently from photographers that they saw this incredible scene and made a photography but then felt that the photograph didn’t capture what they saw and are while not completely dissatisfied have determined that something is missing.

When we spend time reviewing the image, we commonly come to the agreement that the image lacks the depth, that the photographer saw before making the image.

Exactly. But why?

Humans have depth perception because we have binocular vision. We don’t actually see in 3D, in objective reality, we have stereoscopic vision. We see two different things and our brains bring the two together to provide depth vision.

If we do a couple of simple exercises we also discover that when we look at something, only one distance is perfectly sharp while elements farther away in front or behind are soft. If we bring our attention to one of those elements what is soft changes. Humans do not see with massive depth of field, but often think that they do. To quote a very old National Lampoon skit, “wrong again honey”.

I suspect that you are starting to see the issue at hand. Too much depth of field.

What? But we always want tons of depth of field, don’t we? Of course we don’t. If we make a portrait, all of us know that the only focus point is the closest eyeball. We also tend to use wider apertures to put the background out of focus so it does not distract. Depending on the lens used and the distance between lens and subject, we might even find that the tip of the nose is out of focus and certainly the front of the ears have gone soft.

Plenty of sense of depth here

It is this conscious use of limited depth of field that is what gives the portrait depth and makes it look like it has depth. Certainly lighting, posing and other elements are contributors, but it was that decision to shoot close with a longer focal length and the lens wide open that creates depth. Why is the 85mm f/1.2 so often called the portrait lens? Because when used in tight and wide open, it creates depth in the portrait.

Now let’s go to the landscape where I hear this question raised most. The first “error” is using an inappropriate focal length. I know that camera shops will tell you that you need a wide angle lens for landscapes. You can certainly do so, but the massive depth of field at pretty much any aperture will provide a large field of view, but it also provides a large field of view with little to no depth. Since when you the human looks at a landscape with your Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball, the whole scene is never in sharp focus, when your image is, you see unconsciously that it doesn’t look right.

Now if we take the position that all photographs only have a single critical subject and that everything else is there to provide context, which will be discussed in a future article, then why do we seek so much depth of field. If the thing that attracts me is an acacia tree on a plain, silhouetted by a sunset from behind distant mountains, what must be in focus?

Clearly the acacia tree is the subject must be in focus. What about the grasslands in front of the tree? They can be soft with sharpness increasing where the tree is. What about the mountains in the far distance? They should be soft to create depth, not tack sharp.

This representation of soft becoming tack sharp at the primary subject then getting softer as the actual distance behind the subject gets greater, is what your eye and brain see when you focus on the acacia tree. And now the photograph more accurately represents what you were actually seeing but consciously chose to ignore when making the image.

In serious photography, you get to decide where the focus point is and how much depth of field to use. To get the most accurate representation of your subject as the eye actually sees it, you need less depth of field than you have been taught.

Less is actually more.

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