Where To Focus For Clear Landscape Photos

[supraman408]

Hi everyone,
New to photography and the forum. I have a Canon T6s and wanted to get into landscape, cityscape and maybe astrophotography. I have a question regarding where to focus for clear, crisp landscape pictures. From the information Im reading online, I am told to focus on the bottom third of the photo and everything beyond this plane will be in focus. I've also heard that I can focus to infinity and everything will also be in focus as well. Can someone explain situations where one would focus on the bottom third of the landscape versus focusing to infinity for crisp, clear, landscape photos. Il be using my Canon T6s and renting the Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 II USM lens. Thanks in advance!

 

[john.margetts]

What you are talking about is hyperfocal focusing. How much you get in focus depends on the aperture you use. I use f/8 and focus on infinity almost all the time. Using a 14 mm lens will give you greater depth of field and most of the image will be in focus wherever you focus.

 

[kalgra]

What you are referring to is called hyper focal distance. Search that term and you will find several youtube videos and articles which explain what HFD is and how to calculate that distance for your lens as different focal lengths and lenses will have different HFD. There are also apps that help with this.

In general on something like a 14mm lens at say f11-16 focusing 1/3rd from the bottom of the frame will get you pretty close to hyper focal distance and in many cases will render everything in the image acceptably sharp but it will just be ballpark. Focusing to infinity WILL NOT render everything in focus even with a very small aperture. Your foreground will be out of focus.

If you are shooting stars and milky way scenes then yes you will want to find true infinity for the stars. Often time focus stacking (combining or blending multiple exposures with different focus distances) is required or can be used to achieve razor sharp images all the way through the image especially when shooting the milkyway.

Hope that helps get you started.

 

[benhasajeep]

With older lenses you just set infinity mark from your focus scale at your far aperture setting on the lens. This needs to be done in manual focus. You can tell your sharp focus range by reading your close aperture setting mark. For example on a 14mm lens at f/8. And the lens had the aperture scale on it. The aperture starts counting up both directions on the lens with the largest aperture setting in the middle. One set of numbers to the left, and one to the right. So you set infinity on the 8 to the left (if focus distance scale reads right to left on the lens). Then you look at 8 on the right. It will probably be somewhere around 1.7'. So hyperfocal focusing on the sample lens would give you sharp focus from 1.7' to infinity.


Since many new lenses don't have proper scales or markings anymore (too small to be of use). A rule of thumb is to focus at a point that is up from the bottom of the frame 1/3 of the way up. If using AF for this. Move the AF point down to one that is about 1/3 from the bottom of the frame.

 

[fmw]

The answer with modern AF cameras is pretty simply. Focus on whatever part of the subject you want in perfect focus. If that puts the lens at infinity, then so be it. If it doesn't then you may need to worry about depth of field. No need to make it more complicated than it is.

 

[Tomasko]

@fmw , except for the landscape photography (OP's question), where you don't have a specific subject but rather the whole view. So based on this advice just randomly pick a focus point and shoot? Probably not, right?

 

[fmw]

@fmw , except for the landscape photography (OP's question), where you don't have a specific subject but rather the whole view. So based on this advice just randomly pick a focus point and shoot? Probably not, right?

I didn't say randomly. I said focus on the part of the subject you want in perfect focus. If the the entire subject is beyond the infinity focal point of the lens, then what you choose is immaterial.

As an example. Let's say you want a nearby flower in focus with distant mountains in the back ground. You will need to focus on the flower if it is the important part of the subject. The mountains may or may not be in focus depending on the lens and the aperture setting. If the mountains are the important part of the image then you focus on them and the flowers will be the part of the image that needs to be managed in terms of depth of field.

 

[dxqcanada]

The DoF preview button does come in handy for fore/background landscape focus ... hmmm, I don't think I have ever used it on any of the cameras I've had ... hmm though it was never a universal feature.

 

[Designer]

Your information is somewhat bifurcated. In the first case;

I am told to focus on the bottom third of the photo and everything beyond this plane will be in focus.

They are referring to the characteristics of the depth of field (DOF). With most lenses, the area of best focus can be thought of as being roughly in the middle, so about one half of the marginal-but -acceptable focus will be in front of the focal plane and about half will be behind it. Using the rule of thumb as the first one-third is not a bad place to start, as you'll get most of the scene in focus. (The laws of optics dictate that the final two thirds will be in good focus usually.

I've also heard that I can focus to infinity and everything will also be in focus as well.

The other part of this is that if your lens is somewhat on the short/wide side, then most of the range will be in focus just because. That only works with fairly wide-angle lenses, and cannot be used universally. This is why cheap pocket cameras and smart phones (wide angle lenses) will get nearly everything in focus, whether the photographer wishes for something else or not. We get people on here asking why they can't seem to blur the background with their wide angle lenses. That's just the way it works.

For beginners, I suggest that you learn how to figure the DOF with your particular camera, your particular lens, and your particular intended shot. You should learn how to do that sometime, so you might as well learn it sooner rather than later.

 

[KmH]

Understanding Your Camera’s Hyperfocal Distance

 

[KmH]

The DoF preview button does come in handy for fore/background landscape focus ... hmmm, I don't think I have ever used it on any of the cameras I've had ... hmm though it was never a universal feature.

The only problem when using DoF preview is that the lens has to stop down to whatever aperture it is set to to see the preview.
The smaller the lens aperture the dimmer the DoF preview in the camera viewfinder or live view.
At some point the preview gets so dim we can't see the DoF.

 

[dxqcanada]

Keith, you just reminded me why I didn't use it on my film cameras
Hmm ... I just checked and my current Sony SLT the EFV compensates ... I had a feeling it did that.

 

[TCampbell]

Keith, you just reminded me why I didn't use it on my film cameras
Hmm ... I just checked and my current Sony SLT the EFV compensates ... I had a feeling it did that.

It was fairly easy to see on film cameras because most of the lenses had DoF marks. On modern lenses the amount of rotation to focus is usually smaller (gear ratios) many lenses don't even bother with DoF marks.

Here's my old Canon AE-1 with the basic 50mm lens. You can see the aperture ring is set to f/22. This means that we can use the two smaller "22" marks left and right on the center scale which indicates the DoF and then look to see what distances are covered in that range.

In this case I aligned the infinity mark with the "22" on the far end of the range and then look to see what distance is aligned with the "22" mark on the near end of the range.

When you read that range, you see the distance is roughly 6' through infinity which should be in focus.

The hyper-focal distance is the distance that you'd see by looking above the center focus point index mark (center of the scale). So it's actually somewhere around 12-13' to achieve the "hyper-focal distance" for f/22 on a 50mm lens for this camera. But notice we didn't need to know to focus the lens to 12-13'... we just know to align the "infinity" mark with the far-end of the DoF marks that correspond to whatever f-stop we are using. If we used f-11 then we'd nudge the infinity mark over to the "11".

Today so many lenses don't even bother to print the scale on the lens (because few people manually focus the lens). But you can use a DoF calculator (there are many).

 

[Derrel]

Focus where it's needed, using the Depth of FIeld Preview button and manually focusing with the lens stopped down to the shooting aperture value. Or, bracket the focus in two or three or four steps, depending. Sometimes the NEAR-distance is more critial than the far- or mid-distances, and it pays to favor the foreground a bit. At other times, wherever there is the most-critical, most-important detail, that is the area that merits the sharpest focus placment.

This all varies according to the scene, and the lens; with a telephoto lens shot, the MOST-important stuff almost always needs to be the clearest; with shorter focal length lenses, sometimes you can allow one of the distances to be a bit less-sharp; for instance, many times we sort of sunconsciously expect the far distances to be a little blurry, due to haze or sheer distance, or because they are not critically important to the story of the picture.

In the digitial era, 3- and 4- and 5-shot focus stack blends can be used, so that everything looks sharp, but focus stacking is NOT always possible to do on all shots or scenes.

 

[supraman408]

Thank you all for the response. I did some shooting after reading everyones replies and watching a few videos on youtube on hyperlocal distance and how to actually set that on my lens. Below are two pictures taken from Kerry Park in Seattle, WA. For some reason, I feel like Im not doing it correctly because these don't look as sharp as other landscape photography pictures I've seen online. When I zoom in, I feel like the picture is pixelated/noisy.

Again, Im using a Canon T6s with a 14mm f2.8L II lens. My settings were aperture priority, f11, ISO 100, manual focus, picture style: landscape, white balance: cloudy, manual selection: 1pt auto focus, and self timer on 2 second. Any pointers is greatly appreciated. Thanks again!
IMG_0977 by
[url=https://flic.kr/p/YWjvXu]

IMG_1706 by

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