Can anyone clarify for me the various terms used to describe depth of field? There are so many it's hard without a photo dictionary to relate in my head what's actually being said to me about the matter...
As I understand it here are the two extremes:
what terms are used for no depth of field images (where everything is in perfect focus)?
what terms are used for super small depth of field (where the nose is in focus and ears are blurry, background blurry and some foreground if present is blurry)?
And what lens settings are used to obtain these two effects?
Answer
The focus distance is the distance from your camera's sensor in which everything is in perfect focus. Unless you use a specialized tilt/shift lens, there is only one such distance.
Objects closer and further than the focus distance are out of focus by some amount. The closer to the focus distance, the more in focus they are.
Depth-of-field is the range of distances where things are acceptably close to being in focus. This is not absolute and is inversely proportional to viewing size. In other words, the same photo has more depth-of-field when printed smaller.
Shallow depth-of-field means the depth-of-field is small which implies that things get quickly out of focus. Depth-of-field is made shallower using larger apertures (denoted by small F/numbers), using a longer focal-length (more zoomed-in) and using a larger sensor (For example, full-frame vs cropped vs compact-camera sensors).
The Hyperfocal distance is the distance at which you can focus your lens to make things acceptably focused at infinity while maximizing depth-of-field. This short article explains it and includes a calculator to compute the hyperfocal distance depending on your camera and lens.
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