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One of the many flowers in the walled garden area, at Attingham Park, Nr. Shrewsbury, Shropshire, a National Trust property.
should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
Sophia Loren
Our crazy camping in Carpinteria, CA. Of course, we all got excited about the fence. Flikr addicts, we are. :-)
Happy Friday Everyone! Have a wonderful weekend.
Example usage
I'm about 1m from a tree I want in-focus. What focus distance, focal lengths and apertures can I use if I also want the far distance to be in focus?
From the graph I can see that the most extreme case would be 35mm at f/32, focused at 2m (the hyperfocal distance is double the nearest-sharp distance). Suppose f/16 is my limit - I could then only use a focal length up to 25mm. Of course, I could also choose to use 10mm at f/8, which would give me plenty of leeway. I just musn't go beyond 35mm at f/32
Reasons for creating the graph
Since I’m dabbling with landscapes at the moment, I want to know how close I can get to an object in the foreground while still keeping objects in the distance in focus. I've stuffed up a few photos by being too close to the foreground for the focal length I've chosen.
Most hyperfocal and DOF calculators I found weren't very useful at helping me choose a sensible focal length - they want me to choose one up-front.
Bearing this in mind I’ve drawn this relatively simple graph. It assumes that you’re using a 1.6x crop SLR and focusing at the hyperfocal distance. Using the graph you can simultaneously decide how close you can get to the foreground, a realistic focal length and a sensible aperture to use. You can also read the hyperfocal length from it too - it's double the nearest sharp distance.
From several articles and forum discussions I’ve realised that it can be better to use an aperture closer to f/8 than to f/32 because large f-numbers cause softer images overall, so ruling out the benefits of increased DOF. It is often a balancing act between the two.
I used equations from here: www.dofmaster.com/equations.html