Understanding Depth of Field

Depth of field just means the amount of the picture that is in focus, the front and back of the image will be out of focus and the middle, hopefully where your product is, will be sharp.

You can change the depth of field by using the aperture of your lens, a small aperture, f22, will allow more of the item to be in focus whereas a large aperture, say f1.6, only a thin sliver of the item may be in focus.

If you want all of your product in focus then you will need to stop down the lens to a smaller aperture, but the trade off is that you will then need to put more light onto the product.

The closer you are to a product with the lens the less of that item will be in focus at any one time this is why taking pictures of small items like watches and jewellery can be difficult.

There are ways of getting around this by taking lots of photos with different focus points from the front to back of the product then combining them in post production to produce a single image that is all in focus. This is known as Focus Stacking.