Depth of Field
Created | Updated Feb 24, 2013
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: Depth of Field
As I said last week, I appreciate you folks. All this month, Create has been running a great challenge to find a family photo and write about it. I hope you've done yours, but if you haven't yet, I'd like to challenge you to do so.
One of the great things about using a photo as a writing prompt is that it isn't a facile exercise. There are so many things you can learn from a photo. So many points of view to consider, as well: do you look at the photo? Or do you look out from inside the photo? Do you identify with the figures in the picture? With whom do you identify? What you see may not be what anyone else sees. I'd like to get you to look at a picture with me.
This isn't a family photo of mine. I borrowed it from the Library of Congress. The photographer who took this in 1913 was researching child labour. He went around taking pictures of children – who should have been in school – doing jobs that would have been hard for adults. These little kids, Elbert (10) and Ruby (7), picked cotton in Deniston, Texas. Elbert picked 125 pounds of the stuff a day. His little sister managed 35 pounds.
I've never picked cotton. Using my older relatives as informants, I have gleaned this information: it was horrible work. In the first place, the heat could be life-threatening. Notice the bleached-out landscape. Imagine doing this work in 40+-degree weather. Look at the picture: is this a comfortable posture? What was that like for a small child, who wanted to play, to interact, to learn? What was it like to wait for someone to come around with water to replace the fluids you were losing? What was it like to have an aching back and painfully sore fingers from wrenching cotton bolls from stubborn bushes? What was it like to do this when you were hungry, and not sure what you would have to eat, or when?
Yes, this picture makes us – as modern adults – angry about a lot of things. We might want to jump on a bandwagon. We might want to rage against the inhumanity of the human race. We might want to write long treatises about history, or law, or social causes. We might do all of those things.
But first, look at the picture.
Modern cameras have many advantages. Digital cameras can snap pictures and send them directly to your computer. A motor drive can follow exciting action, like the basketball player from jump to slam-dunk. Extremely sensitive film – 1000-speed or more – can catch a butterfly's wing in mid-flutter. Supersaturated colour can give us a richer image. Long exposures can capture the magic dance of neon and files of cars down a well-travelled highway. A telephoto lens can bring the far-away closer.
A telephoto lens, however, illustrates the trade-off we make when we zoom in so close: in the telephoto, the object we're looking at is sharply focused, but the background can be a blur. What we're looking at stands out from what we're not looking at. We don't have depth of field.
Old cameras didn't have this feature. A fixed-focus camera can't zoom in and out. But it has great depth of field: you see lots of background details. Look at this picture again.
What do you notice first? The children, heads bent. You can't see their expressions. All you see are the cap and bonnet, the bowed backs. The sharpness of the image allows you to see the boy's hands, involved in the precise work of picking. His whole body speaks concentration. (Remember: he's ten years old.)
Look around in that picture. Look carefully. What do you see? 'A boring landscape.' Well, yes. Boring, indeed. Not exactly lush. Dry, scrubby. That cotton isn't exactly growing high or thick on the ground. This is Texas, not the Mississippi Delta. Those kids are working hard for those 160 pounds of cotton a day. Oh, you might want to know: they probably get 2 cents a pound for the work. Maybe that's too generous an estimate, but that's what my mom said her uncle paid in the 1930s. Not that he'd let his niece pick cotton – she'd play at it for an hour, then he'd pretend it weighed something, she said, and give her a nickel for the candy store. These children didn't have an uncle like that – one who might have been an unsuccessful farmer, but who'd save a nickel for his brother's child. Elbert's dad couldn't do that: he, his wife, and all the other siblings were out there picking, too. Can you see them in your mind's eye? Do you have that depth of field yet?
Look at the ground between the cotton rows. It's hard, dry. Unforgiving. What does that feel like? Can you put yourself there yet? If you can, you're getting the depth of that field. And you're almost ready to write. Don't think facts and figures. Don't think character first. Think: I don't care that I'm staring into a computer. I don't care that it's 5 degrees C outside, and threatening snow. I don't care that everyone's talking about the next election. Right now, I'm standing on hot, dry, packed dirt. The sun is beating down. It's stifling. My back aches, my fingers are sore, I'm dying of thirst, I'm hungry and tired and sad and ten years old. Now. Start writing – a poem, a paragraph, a story, a song, a play. Anything.
You've got the depth of field.
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