Selective focusing with a wide aperture can add a lot of creativity to your images. You are telling the viewer where you want the focus of the image to be, and the meaning and story changes depending on what is in focus. Using a telephoto lens can compress your background even more, decreasing the depth of fi eld and making the background or foreground even blurrier. But take into consideration that just because your background or foreground is blurry, it doesn’t mean you can’t show detail in those areas (Figure 8.1).
If you want the entire image to be in focus, you would use a smaller aperture. Images with great depth of fi eld, such as a landscape or an image with a lot of detail, direct the viewer to look at the entire scene (Figure 8.2).