[Wheatfield]

Don't get stuck on everything being in focus either, many great landscapes have out of focus elements in them,
Soft foregrounds framing backgrounds, sharp foregrounds, with soft backgrounds,
There is no one answer,
Light and composition are usually much stronger elements of landscape than sharpness.

Some 20 years ago I was in a gallery store in Santa Fe. They had an original signed by St. Ansel himself copy of Moonrise for sale (for a mere US$16K). One of the things I noticed about the original print that never shows up in the lithograph copies of it is that the cemetery in the foreground was ever so slightly outside of the DOF.

[K-Three]

original signed by St. Ansel himself

I've seen a portfolio of his work, original prints, they are magnificent, and no reproductions do his work proper justice. But most don't hold up to pixel peeping, His prints need to be enjoyed from a decent distance.
Remember, he was working with big film, (pretty sure Moonrise is an 8x10 neg) simple old lenses, and frequently from the top of a car, none of which support the "nose close" picture viewing so common today.

[mikeSF]

I'm sorry I didn't see this thread sooner, as I hav...

William, you are too kind - thanks for those nice words.
And excellent advice given!

[StiffLegged]

Some 20 years ago I was in a gallery store in Santa Fe. They had an original signed by St. Ansel himself copy of Moonrise for sale (for a mere US$16K). One of the things I noticed about the original print that never shows up in the lithograph copies of it is that the cemetery in the foreground was ever so slightly outside of the DOF.

And yet what caught his eye when he made that image was the last sunlight on the gravestones…

[Sandy Hancock]

Personally I'm not too concerned about diffraction at f/11 on crop. I took this a few days ago in my garden; f/11 and focussed about a third of the way in, as there was no obvious point of interest. Although it won't win any prizes at this year's Landscape Awards, the depth of field seems adequate, while preserving enough fine detail where it's needed.

It is a full size jpeg if you want to wade into it in Flickr. The pink rose in the right foreground is only a couple of metres away, and the red-leaved pin oak is about 50 metres a away.

[Wheatfield]

And yet what caught his eye when he made that image was the last sunlight on the gravestones…

One of the books he wrote gave a synopsis of how that image was taken. Apparently he didn't have a lot of time to set up his camera and did a lot of "experienced guesswork". He could have used another stop of DOF, but he had to balance against exposure time to capture the light before it disappeared.

[pschlute]

f/11 and focussed about a third of the way in

A rule of thumb I still use today. In film days we did not have the luxury of instant review, and DOF preview was difficult to assess due to the darkness of the viewfinder image. Rather than get DOF charts out to consult, this method always worked.

My first wide angle lens, the M 28 2.8 had red markings on the 10 foot/3 metre didtance scale and f8 on the aperture ring. If in doubt set the lens so they line up and you can spend a whole session without having to bother with focus at all

[texandrews]

A rule of thumb I still use today. In film days we did not have the luxury of instant review, and DOF preview was difficult to assess due to the darkness of the viewfinder image. Rather than get DOF charts out to consult, this method always worked.

My first wide angle lens, the M 28 2.8 had red markings on the 10 foot/3 metre didtance scale and f8 on the aperture ring. If in doubt set the lens so they line up and you can spend a whole session without having to bother with focus at all

It"s how I used to do it, zone focus. But using a lot of Tri-X and IP4 really helped here.

[rogerstg]

Don't miss out on capturing the grittiness and desolation of the Badlands by taking advantage of side lighting at mid morning or late afternoon. Below was taken two and a half hours after sunrise.

[RGlasel]

If I try to remember that I am an IT person vacationing with a camera

Your shots of the Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore are an order of magnitude better than the shots I got in the summer of 2014. I'm going to post two shots from that vacation that hopefully will make the point that hard and fast rules should be ignored. Photography is a matter of first, seeing something you want to capture, second, quickly deciding on how you are going to capture what you see and third, using the results to guide your future photographic decisions. You will never get perfect results, but sometimes you get results that turn out better than expected and over time, unexpectedly good results will come more frequently.

Taken in Program mode, for whatever reason my camera decided f5.0 was going to be the aperture. I learned a long time ago that if you have something in the foreground that you want to feature, get it in focus and don't worry about the background. I do try to use hyperfocal distance with wide angle shots, but for normal and telephoto perspectives it just isn't worth the hassle. This is also an illustration why carrying a tripod with you might not be practical.



Taken at f10, detail and sharpness have more to do with natural contrast and light than your camera settings. I've cropped out half of the original 16MP image taken with the DA 18-135 at 135mm, but you can zoom in on it in Flickr and I won't be embarrassed.

[James O'Neill]

I carry D.o.F information in my head. hyperfocal for 50mm at f/8 is 10M (30 feet) on ff. And focus at H/n gives you a d.o.f zone from h/(n+1) to h/(n-1)

Second bit first. if you focus at H (or H/1) you have dof from h/2 to infinity (h/0) ; focus at H/2 you've got H/3 to H (H/1) , H/10 it's H/11 to H/9.

If the lens is focused at infinity, at distance D the circle of confusion size is f*f / (D*a). For a 36x24 frame, printed to "normal" size viewed from "normal" distance the circle is noticeable at about 0.03mm. A bigger frame (MF or large format) has a bigger number. A cropped frame has a smaller one (e.g. 0.02 for APS-C, uncropped). If you crop / magnify the size gets very small. But if f*f/(D*a) = c ; the distance is f*f/(c*a) hence 50*50/(0.03*8) is roughly 10,000mm or 10M

If you focus at H the biggest circle you'll get behind there is c, but in front there's really no limit to the circle size. Stuff goes out of focus faster on camera side of where you're focused than on the infinity side

If the focus distance isn't an easy fraction of H, the near point and far point are H*D/(H-D) and H*D/(H+D)

To go back to the very first post you never get "tack sharp from x to infinity" (unless X is very large).
If you focus at H you get acceptably sharp (for the conditions you used to calculate H) from H/2 to infinity. If you you look at at 1/3 of a K3 image at 100% or or 1/4 of a K1 image to get 100% your value of H has moved 3 or 4 times further away. Or if you keep the default calculation you see things are not quite sharp. If I stick with the 50mm as an example, if I set it f/16 , focus at the hyperfocal distance for f/16 of 5M (15 feet), Infinity is just about in focus, but between defocus and diffraction infinity doesn't stand up to close examination.
So maybe I will set a wider aperture, and reduce the circle size I'm allowed. At f/8 with 1/2 the "normally allowed" size to allow for some pixel peeping, I need to focus at 20M. Where I focus is going to determine how close to "tack" sharp I get at infinity (and vice versa) and having set that the closest point which I consider "in focus" is what it is.

For a lens like my DFA 21 H is so short (1.8M) I can have everything from 0.9M (3 feet) to infinity roughly in focus, but I might focus at 4 or 5M, have infinity super sharp and acceptably sharp foreground down to about 1.3M (4 feet).

[madison_wi_gal]

Don't miss out on capturing the grittiness and desolation of the Badlands by taking advantage of side lighting at mid morning or late afternoon

Well I went back Friday, but skies were cloudy and I never saw any significant side lighting. I'll go back and look at the ones I took on Tuesday, I was there almost all day.

---------- Post added 05-06-23 at 19:21 ----------

But Pentax figured it out in their digital SLR to make your life easy: program mode setting "deep DoF". For the K1, that's f/11. For the K3, that f/8.

I just now read this. My K-3 III has been in MTF as recommended by the forum review. I wish I had taken the time to change it. Anyway, I still got good pix, and I have learned a lot in this thread.

[Kerrowdown]

I used the wrong aperture, the wrong shutter speed, the wrong focus mode, the wrong conditions (lousy weather, no tripod, bad mood) and possibly the wrong lens

So apart from that... it all went well.

Back in the day... most Pentax manual lenses made the task somewhat easier, you just in lined up the Red distance marker with the Red diamond and the Red f stop number on the lens scale.

In fact some of my "Ladies" still wear this Red make up.