The functional depth of field scale is something that is sorely missing from modern lenses. Lens manufacturers and camera brands have proven several things over the years: and chief amongst them is the fact that pretty much anything is possible. Several years ago, they said that full-frame Mirrorless cameras wouldn’t be possible — but Leica proved them wrong. Shortly after that, they stated that phase detection wasn’t possible on the sensor, but that changed too. Sony, a major innovator, at one point, said that dual card slots and bigger batteries weren’t possible with their a7 series of cameras. Time has proven that with money, anything is possible.
What modern lenses are sorely missing right now is the functional depth of field scale. Sure, we have autofocus that’s pretty good and AI/Scene detection to help us photographers capture better photos. But that’s the problem; it’s helping us capture and not necessarily helping us create better in-camera. Creating and capturing are two completely different mental concepts, and we’ve discussed it with several photographers here on this blog over the years.
To help folks understand this, consider a reality of life. How many of you remember the cell phone number of your best friends? What about your kids? Do you know the cell phone number of your spouse by heart? What about your mom? I’m willing to bet a lot of money that you don’t remember them. And we don’t recall these important numbers because they’re stored in our phones. So whenever we need to call someone, we just press the auto-dial function or tell our phones to call them.
This is an idea that’s fundamental in communications studies: how as we use technology, we become the technology. The same applies to autofocus right now. When we let a machine do everything for us, we remove ourselves from the process of picture creation. To that end, it separates us from the holistic experience.
Make no mistake, I’m not bashing anyone on how they shoot. And instead, I’m stating a fact: we’re separated and not an active part of the creative process anymore besides pushing a button and perhaps working with a subject. Of course, there are other parameters but we can have even more control.
A functional depth of field scale would change this so much more, not just for photographers but for videographers. Just consider how much the cinema world uses cinema lenses with precision depth of field markers, and all.
This is an idea that’s fundamental in communications studies: how as we use technology, we become the technology. The same applies to autofocus right now. When we let a machine do everything for us, we remove ourselves from the process of picture creation. To that end, it separates us from the holistic experience.
For photographers, it would help with a variety of things. And here’s a short list of how it could help photographers across various industries:
- Landscape photographers would have a better understanding of their exposures, ISO settings, gradation filters, and more if they truly were able to understand how much of a scene was in focus. Digital depth of field scales uses focus peaking in an inefficient way of doing this. The depth of field scale used to be a gold standard for landscape photography. This idea also applies to astrophotography.
- Street photographers would have a much easier time shooting the most human moments in public. The depth of field scale is a critical part of zone focusing.
- Candid photographers wouldn’t have to fight the autofocus in low-light events. This is especially the case for photographing people of color in low light. It’s a problem that most camera manufacturers have.
- Portrait photographers could have an actual, better understanding of how depth of field works with taking photos like headshots. A swathe of photographers would suddenly stop shooting every portrait wide open all the time, and they’d suddenly discover that their lenses have more than one aperture. Okay, now I’m being a jester about this.
- Sports photographers would shoot in a way that’s similar to how old sports photographs were done. It would mean that they use more creative effects like dragging the shutter.
- Wildlife photographers would face a similar situation as sports photographers.
- Studio photographers would think more about their set design and the specific elements that they want in focus.
- Overall, photographers would carefully consider their compositions more if they had an effective depth of field scale.
To clarify this even more, consider the fact that I’m not talking about cameras here. I’m instead talking about lenses.
With this said, I’ve got a challenge for various photographers. Go try a manual focus lens and use the depth of field scale. Give it a concerted try for a month or so and go take photos with it every day for a month. In fact, I think that you should try it for three months because that’s how long it takes for a habit to form.
The ease that autofocus allows has obnubilated our creative visions and our efforts. The technological advances help at times, but they only do so in the short term when photographers start to instead forget how to make their photos using human brain waves instead of relying on what the devices can do.
For photographers to take the industry back from AI imagery processes, part of it means that we have to give clients and consumers a reason to want to pay attention to us. And if we become more of an active part of the image-making process, we reach for higher fruit. When we aim for higher fruit, then we have career-lasting effects. If it isn’t your career, then you’ll understand as a passionate photographer how important it is to be part of the process when making photographs. The return of the functional depth of field scale to modern lenses can change this.