Panaramic help, and suggestions needed for apature

[dmorgan924]

I am working on redoing this photo attached. But I have some questions. The shot is of a city so I want everything in focus. I was using a 300mm lens at 150mm on a Sony a35. I know that you get the sharpest photo by using f8-11 or so. But would a higher f-stop be more in focus but not as sharp? Any suggestions on what to do? I plan on re shooting with more than 150mm so I get a bigger photo. Should I stay around f8-11 or should I go the max f-stop?

photo was ISO 100, f-13, 6 Second exposure.

large version

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5Uis2RlxS1mNTMzTmptR0oxMVU/edit

 

[Judobreaker]

Max f-stop will make you lose sharpness.
Look up hyperfocal distances. A 150mm on a DX sensor at f/11 has a hyperfocal distance of roughly 100m. This means that when you focus at 100mm at f/11 everything from 50m distance from you camera and further on will be sharp.
If the closest building is more than 50m away (which I think is true in this shot) you're golden. If not you'll need to up the aperture a bit.

 

[480sparky39 38]

Find the 'sweet spot' of the lens.... the one aperture that is the sharpest overall. You can google the lens and read what others will say is the SS, but I prefer to run my own tests and pixel-peep the results. This gives me the sweet spot of MY lens when mounted on MY camera.

Then calculate the hyperfocal distance for that lens. Shoot at that aperture and that focus distance setting.

 

[TCampbell]

This exposure doesn't really require a broad depth of field.

If you were shooting down a long street or boulevard, so that you had subjects both near and far, then you'd want a broad depth of field. But in your example, all the buildings are far. There's really nothing in the foreground.

Since you have nothing in the foreground, just pick the f-stop that yields the sharpest image quality. I don't know what that would be for YOUR particular lens, but it's generally about 2 stops down from whatever wide-open is for a lens and quite often it's somewhere in the f/5.6 to f/8 range.

 

[hirejn]

What you want is depth of field, and yes a higher f-number will give you that. I'm a tad bit confused about your concern since everything in the image does look in focus. With a flat scene like the one you're shooting, perhaps a higher aperture won't give you as much of a benefit. If everything is generally on the same focal plane, you could probably get it sharp at f/4 to f/5.6. Don't listen to anyone trying to scare you out of using settings like high f-numbers. Be a photographer, not a scientist. If you want to let the scientists scare you out of taking a picture, that's your game. I'd suggest, however, that if you want to shoot at the smallest aperture for greater DOF, then you shoot at the smallest aperture. For this image, again you might not gain much with f/16. When you make a great image, nobody's going to care that you broke the "rules" and shot it at f/22 or f/4, nor will they be able to tell from looking at it what aperture you used.