You could use a hyperfocal-distance chart or app, but I find these cumbersome and slow. (There’s more depth of field behind the spot you focus on than in front, so focusing closer to the foreground will allow you to stretch the depth of field to encompass both the closest and farthest objects.)Ĭan we get more precise than that? Absolutely. Where (at what distance) should you focus? The short answer is: somewhere in between, and closer to the foreground than the background. That’s a lot of depth, even for a wide-angle lens, so precise focusing is critical. Let’s say you’ve composed a photograph with a 24mm lens, where the closest object to the camera is 3 feet away, and the farthest object is at infinity. If there’s something in the frame that’s closer than that, you have to be more careful about where you focus. And since the depth of field was minimal I could use f/5.6, a fairly wide aperture, and still be sure of getting everything in focus. So focusing was easy I could autofocus anywhere, knowing that every section of the photograph was at infinity, so the focus distance for everything was the same. Although I used a telephoto lens (145mm) for this photograph, the cliffs and waterfall were at least half a mile from the camera – essentially at infinity as far as the lens was concerned. Upper Yosemite Fall and rainbow, Yosemite. (These distances apply regardless of the sensor size, or crop factor. With a 100mm lens it’s more like 250 feet. With a 50mm lens that “safe” distance is about 100 feet. If you’re using a wide-angle lens (say 28mm or wider), it’s safe to say that if everything in the photograph is at least 50 feet away, then you don’t have to worry about depth of field, and you can focus anywhere in the frame. You probably know that it’s easier to get everything in focus with wide-angle lenses than telephoto lenses. How far away am I talking about? That depends on the lens. You can focus on any part of the frame, either manually or with autofocus, and be sure that you’re focusing at the right distance. All the objects in the picture are essentially at infinity as far as the lens is concerned, so the focus distance for everything is the same. If everything in the photograph is far away, focusing can be easy. If you don’t want to go over that territory again, however, feel free to skip down to the section below called “When the Hyperfocal Distance Doesn’t Apply.”)įirst, let’s assume that you want to get everything in focus (which probably applies to 99% of landscape photographs). The next section repeats some of that information, but with additional details. (In that previous post I covered some of the basics about focusing and finding the hyperfocal distance. One of the steps in my routine, focusing, deserves a little more attention, so I’m going to cover that step in more detail here. In this recent post I talked about the importance of having a solid, well-practiced field routine, so that you don’t forget important steps, and you’ll be less likely to panic when the light gets interesting. 16mm, three bracketed exposures at f/16, ISO 100, blended with Lightroom’s HDR Merge. Then I stopped to down to f/16 to get enough depth of field to make both the foreground and background sharp. I used my hyperfocal-distance shortcut to find the optimum focus distance, by doubling the distance from the closest object and focusing at four feet. The focal length was 16mm, and the closest objects to the camera were the flowers at the very bottom of the frame, about two feet from the lens. Sun rising over a field of lupines, Redwood NP, California.
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