Help on maximising depth of field please!!

Jonno_dudley

Jonno_dudley

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Jonathan Dudley
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Hello all

Can anyone advise on something that I constantly ask myself. I mainly shoot landscapes but i'm still a little wet behind the ears.

I shoot most of my landscapes with a 12-24mm wide lens (19mm on a fullframe) which has a maximum aperature of F22. I find that when i shoot at F22 images can look a little blurry so i step down to F18 or F20 which helps.

But then i find i'm not getting a depth of field i'm after. Usually it's the background that's not as sharp as i would like. i try to make my point of focus at an object that is part of the foreground but not to close to the camera.

Now would i be better off setting the focus manually to a point between the closest focus distance and infinity? Or can anyone else give me any other tips? or could it just be down to my lens i have (which i love)?

Thanks very much
 
Steven001 said:
If I were shooting landscape, I would probably focus on something in the middle of the scene. By doing that, and using a low aperture - like F18 as you said - you should get more of the image in focus.

But hey... I know nothing! :bonk:
Click to expand...

Cheers Steve for fast reply. I see your logic. Just that when i shoot with my wide lens, focusing on an object in the middle would be close to infinity.

Is that how you maximise focus in landscapes then?
 
Hyperfocal or 1/3 into the view.
 
Well thanks all :) . And that's some mixed replies, i guess it's not so straight forward after all. Just googled hyperfocal, that's quite interesting and useful. I will have to try and get a printout of all distances at a particular aperature to bring with me when go out.
 
Janice has given you the answer: both the rule of thumb and the precise one too.

At F11-F16 you should have pretty much everything in focus right out to infinity on a wide-angle lens of the focal length you mentioned.

Anthony.
 
Last edited:
That 12-24 has lots of inherent DOF, use this little tool to see just how much...

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

As already mentioned your soft images at F22 are more than likely from diffraction, F11 should be the max you probably need, even this may suffer slight diffraction, another useful tool at the bottom of this page to see how much....

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

I've experimented with hyperfocal distance but to be honest find that distant objects are too soft, now prefer to use the 2/3 distance point - works pretty well most of the time

simon
 
I pretty much shoot all my landscapes at f8 and never have a problem with too narrow a dof. You just need to focus about 1/3 into the scene.
 
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