Hyperfocal focusing question

[DScience]

I have a nice app that you can input in your focal length and aperture, and it gives you the hyperfocal focusing distance. For example, if you're using a 16mm lens at f/22, the hyperfocal distance is 1' 3.3"

So far what i've been doing, is after framing the scene i'll look for an object that I 'guess' to be about that distance away, and manually focus on it. Now, that's isn't so bad with this set up. But if you have a 35mm lens at f/22 then the hyperfocal distance is 6' 1.1", a little more difficult to approximate.

Thus, aside from using a tape measure is there a more efficient way to get the focus point at the desired hyperfocal distance?

I'm curious what others do.

 

[Overread]

This is one of those things that has become harder. Lenses used to have charts on the barrel to aid hyperfocal focusing and focusing by distance. These days the focus ring is not quite as fine-toothed for manual control as it once was and the distance markings are much rougher - all because the expectation is that now you'll use auto-focus for most things with manual being used to fine tune focusing rather than for hyperfocal

 

[AlanKlein]

Stop down 1/2 or a full stop to increase the DOF and allow a little slop in your estimate of where the hyperfocal distance is.

 

[john.margetts]

If you are using hyperfocal focusing, you do not need to be absolutely accurate. Your example, focusing on 6 feet will be fine, no need to worry about the 1.1 inches!

I use hyperfocal focusing a lot but I err on the side of caution. If I am using an aperture of F/8, I will use the hyperfocal distance for F/5.6. I lose slightly on the depth of field but gain on reliable focus for the important parts of the picture.

 

[KmH]

Using a Nikon DSLR that has 4.8 µm diameter pixels (D7100, D800), with a 16 mm lens on it set to f/22 the airy disc diameter would be something like 30 µm because of diffraction.
You would be giving up quite a bit of focus sharpness within the depth of field (DoF) because 4.8 µm pixels can't resolve a 30 µm airy disc.

F/4 would give you a 3m (9 ft) hyperfocal distance and an airy disc diameter of 5.2 µm, pretty much eliminating soft focus caused by diffraction.
The hyperfocal distance ensures maximum sharpness from half the hyperfocal distance all the way to infinity.
So with a 3m (9 ft.) hyperfocal distance everything from 4.5 feet in front of the image sensor plane to infinity should be sharply in focus.

At f/4 and 16 mm there might be a small part of the bottom of the frame outside the depth of field if you have the camera pointed down somewhat from level.
1. Having that somewhat less sharp area at the bottom of the frame would drive a viewer's eye up away from the bottom of the frame towards your primary subject.
2. You could crop away that little bit of the frame that is slightly outside the DoF, making a landscape oriented frame a bit more panorama like.

Using a too small a lens aperture in the quest for DoF to infinity is a common mistake amateur landscape photographers make that diminishes focus sharpness due to diffraction. I suggest you open your 16 mm lens up about 4 stops to make landscape photos.

 

[Trever1t]

Call me naive but WHY are you wanting this, for nature action or ? I am usually looking for the thinnest DOF that I can use and yet have my subject in complete focus

 

[KC1]

Using a Nikon DSLR that has 4.8 µm diameter pixels (D7100, D800), with a 16 mm lens on it set to f/22 the airy disc diameter would be something like 30 µm because of diffraction.
You would be giving up quite a bit of focus sharpness within the depth of field (DoF) because 4.8 µm pixels can't resolve a 30 µm airy disc.


F/4 would give you a 3m (9 ft) hyperfocal distance and an airy disc diameter of 5.2 µm, pretty much eliminating soft focus caused by diffraction.
The hyperfocal distance ensures maximum sharpness from half the hyperfocal distance all the way to infinity.
So with a 3m (9 ft.) hyperfocal distance everything from 4.5 feet in front of the image sensor plane to infinity should be sharply in focus.

At f/4 and 16 mm there might be a small part of the bottom of the frame outside the depth of field if you have the camera pointed down somewhat from level.
1. Having that somewhat less sharp area at the bottom of the frame would drive a viewer's eye up away from the bottom of the frame towards your primary subject.
2. You could crop away that little bit of the frame that is slightly outside the DoF, making a landscape oriented frame a bit more panorama like.

Using a too small a lens aperture in the quest for DoF to infinity is a common mistake amateur landscape photographers make that diminishes focus sharpness due to diffraction. I suggest you open your 16 mm lens up about 4 stops to make landscape photos.

3 meters is closer to 10 feet than 9 feet, it's 9' 10.11" (9' 10 7/64") or 9.84252 feet.

 

[unpopular]

dof preview/stop down metering.

 

[john.margetts]

Call me naive but WHY are you wanting this, for nature action or ? I am usually looking for the thinnest DOF that I can use and yet have my subject in complete focus

The main use of hyperfocal focusing is landscapes or street. Landscapes because you get most of the image useably sharp and with Street because you do not always have the opportunity to focus each shot.

 

[john.margetts]

Using a Nikon DSLR that has 4.8 µm diameter pixels (D7100, D800), with a 16 mm lens on it set to f/22 the airy disc diameter would be something like 30 µm because of diffraction.
You would be giving up quite a bit of focus sharpness within the depth of field (DoF) because 4.8 µm pixels can't resolve a 30 µm airy disc.


F/4 would give you a 3m (9 ft) hyperfocal distance and an airy disc diameter of 5.2 µm, pretty much eliminating soft focus caused by diffraction.

<snip>

Using a too small a lens aperture in the quest for DoF to infinity is a common mistake amateur landscape photographers make that diminishes focus sharpness due to diffraction. I suggest you open your 16 mm lens up about 4 stops to make landscape photos.

4.8 µm pixels cannot resolve a 30 µm disc but can resolve a 5.2 µm disc? You certainly cannot fit the disc on one pixel but that is not important when viewing the final picture; the angle subtended by the disc at the human pupil is the important bit.

When I use hyperfocal focusing, I use an aperture between F/5.6 and f/11, preferring F/8 if at all possible.

 

[DScience]

Using a Nikon DSLR that has 4.8 µm diameter pixels (D7100, D800), with a 16 mm lens on it set to f/22 the airy disc diameter would be something like 30 µm because of diffraction.
You would be giving up quite a bit of focus sharpness within the depth of field (DoF) because 4.8 µm pixels can't resolve a 30 µm airy disc.


F/4 would give you a 3m (9 ft) hyperfocal distance and an airy disc diameter of 5.2 µm, pretty much eliminating soft focus caused by diffraction.
The hyperfocal distance ensures maximum sharpness from half the hyperfocal distance all the way to infinity.
So with a 3m (9 ft.) hyperfocal distance everything from 4.5 feet in front of the image sensor plane to infinity should be sharply in focus.

At f/4 and 16 mm there might be a small part of the bottom of the frame outside the depth of field if you have the camera pointed down somewhat from level.
1. Having that somewhat less sharp area at the bottom of the frame would drive a viewer's eye up away from the bottom of the frame towards your primary subject.
2. You could crop away that little bit of the frame that is slightly outside the DoF, making a landscape oriented frame a bit more panorama like.

Using a too small a lens aperture in the quest for DoF to infinity is a common mistake amateur landscape photographers make that diminishes focus sharpness due to diffraction. I suggest you open your 16 mm lens up about 4 stops to make landscape photos.

Thank you very much! Although I don't quite grasp everything you're talking about, i'll do some research.

So you think at 16mm I should be using around f/5.6? f/8? f/11?

 

[DScience]

Call me naive but WHY are you wanting this, for nature action or ? I am usually looking for the thinnest DOF that I can use and yet have my subject in complete focus

It's for landscape photography, where the SUBJECT is EVERYTHING in the frame.

 

[Derrel]

I have a long response to hyperfocal distance in a thread from a year or two back. The REAL issue is actually one between theory, and actual reality. The idea that shooting at f/16 or f/22 is bad is overstated, because if sh*+ is not in-focus, it does not matter that you've lost sharpness to "diffraction"--you have instead lost sharpness due to sh*+ being out of focus, and making the image look poor...this is especially true in close-range shooting, where things that are OOF look lousy, and it's obvious that there is insufficient depth of field. I am so tired of hearing about sharpness being lost to diffraction--when the flat out reality is that getting the subject of the photo IN FOCUS is what really counts! Three-and five-shot focus stacks are not always practical or possible when shooting in the real world...but for static scenes, yeah, you can merge multiple frames and make passable to good images.

The serious problem with hyperfocal distance is that it utterly IGNORES the way the human brain sees things. You want to have the best focus onto what really MATTERS. Much of the time, that is the near- to mid-ground, allowing the distance to go a slight bit less sharp. If the near and mid-ground have lots of high-frequency detail, the eye will want to see that rendered crisply, and this will VERY often be much farther away on the focusing distance scale than the hyperfocal distance setting.

When you shoot a landscape, it's possible to not record the foreground, or background, as sharply as the other parts of the scene; the Group f/64 idea that everything MUST BE in absolute, pin-sharp focus is a long dead, dogmatic bit of nonsense, and it looks contrived, especially with longer lenses. But the simple reality is that the human brain will accept a photo where parts of the image are less sharp than other parts. Due to aerial perspective (the proper term for diminished clarity due to atmospherical haze,etc over distance) we often just accept that the distance will actually NOT be all that clear: look at a view of Los Angeles and its skyline...we EXPECT that things 10 miles distant will NOT actually be anywhere near as clearly-seen as things 100 meters from us. And that is where the hyperfocal distance trap can trip a person up if he follows it blindly-- the distance the lens is focused at is the actual sharpest zone, but that is often far too close a range for making an actual scene in the world look sharpest!

A good place to illustrate this is a Pacific Ocean beach. If the sand from 1 meter to 40 meters is a little tiny bit fuzzy--it does not matter. If the lens is set to 6 feet, but at 150 feet there is a tangle of jumbled drift logs washed up at the foot of a headland, and THAT is not the absolute sharpest point in the photo, the shot will look poor. You can, in a word, WASTE depth of field by using a mathematically computed formula by blindly applying it to an actual scene. The best idea is to slightly favor the most-important areas. At the beach for example, favoring the sand up close at the expense of the distance is the perfect example of allowing theory to overcome best actual practice, which is to favor the most-critical range of the composition. The key is "of the composition", the one that is seen, inside my camera's viewfinder, at my location, for my actual picture's composition; this is where the formula might very often not favor the subject; wasting sharpness and wasting DOF on something as smooth and inconsequential as the foreground sand, at the expense of something 30 meters distant, is just not the way to go.

Set up the camera. Shoot at an aperture that has ample DOF for the picture you envision. Ignore theoretical losses in "sharpness"--because frankly, we now have 4x5 view camera DOF and 4x5 view camera quality and resolution in 36MP d-slrs, so the "loss of sharpness" on a modern, ultra-high MP is easily higher than we had 10 years ago at optimal aperture with 12 MP cameras....practice trumps theory...so you lose a bit of sharpness from a 36-MP image or a 24-MP image--that image will look damned good, still. Do some focus bracketing, to see how the placement of the DOF band affects the actual composition you have made; MANY times, a little bit more sharpness in one ZONE of the photo looks better than the focus being optimal on something less-critical. FOR example...do you really think that having the BEST focus at 6 feet distant is the optimal scenario at the beach--because the hyperfocal chart tells you that is where the lens should be focused---and the rest of the scene will merely be "in acceptable focus"? The answer is no, most of the time. GO to a beach....the best focus distance will often be best applied to something 20 to 60 feet away, or even farther--and you can very often have NOTHING (literally) in the picture at 6 feet away. In other words--the theoretical best distance might be occupied by....AIR molecules...meanwhile, that grove of cedar trees at 150 feet is "acceptably sharp"...when it could be crit-i-cally sharp, if you'd have just focused on its distance. High-frequency things, like trees, demand better focus than do things like smooth water, sand, and so on. Many,many times the hyperfocal distance leads you astray.

 

[DScience]

That makes a lot of sense Derrel, i am going to have to think about this for a bit. Let me use the following photo as an example. This was one if the first landscape shots I took with my 20mm f/1.8, and at first I was disappointed because the background wasn't as sharp as I had hoped. But then after more contemplation, I thought that if the background was sharper, the rocks wouldn't have been as good. Is this what you mean?

Perspective by Daniel Sanculi, on Flickr

 

[Trever1t]

Call me naive but WHY are you wanting this, for nature action or ? I am usually looking for the thinnest DOF that I can use and yet have my subject in complete focus

It's for landscape photography, where the SUBJECT is EVERYTHING in the frame.

I see. Hmm, I just use F8-F11 and shoot away