In yesterday’s post, what you saw was an example of using hyperfocal distance to my advantage.  Go ahead and read the wikipedia article.  I’ll wait.

Now, why do we care?  If you can grasp this concept, then it’ll drastically improve the depth of your landscape images.

What does this mean to us when shooting? (more, after the jump)OK, this gets tough to explain, especially in a short area (as I believe a blog post should be).  The main key is that you want to focus as closely as possible so that the areas in the far background are still in focus.

Think about that for a second.

Now, let’s think: what influences depth of field sharpness? Two things:

• Lens size;
• Aperture;

Lens size: the longer the lens (e.g. 200mm vs. 20mm) the smaller the field of sharpness.  The shorter the lens, the larger.  For example, with a 20mm lens, I can focus pretty close up and still have mountains in the distance sharp, even at large apertures.  With a 200mm lens, I’ll still have to focus a long way out.

Aperture: the smaller the f/stop, the more overall sharpness in the image.  Don’t overdo it, though.  Too high of an f/stop can actually cost you overall sharpness (more on that another day).

So the overall trick to getting a photo like yesterday, which was handheld: use as wide an angle as possible (27mm in this case).  Batten down the f/stop so that sharpness goes to infinity (due to haze, this was less important, so I got away with f/8), and bump up ISO until I could hand-hold it.

A different (and better) explanation of hyperfocal distance here.