Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Digital Cameras & Shooting Techniques => Topic started by: almostgreen on March 15, 2018, 04:15:26 pm

Title: Hyperfocal focusing: double the distance to the nearest object
Post by: almostgreen on March 15, 2018, 04:15:26 pm
I keep hearing about the following as a way to keep as much as possible of the scene in focus:  take the distance to the nearest object you want in focus and double it.  This makes no sense to me.  I understand focusing a third of the way in--that's somewhat supported by the dof tables.  But how can this double the distance work when it doesn't take into account how far the farthest objects in the scene are?  Hope someone can explain!
Title: Re: Hyperfocal focusing: double the distance to the nearest object
Post by: Telecaster on March 15, 2018, 04:49:49 pm
My recommendation is to figure out this stuff empirically. IMO it comes down to how much out-of-focusness you are willing to tolerate, in your actual final output (whether print or screen), in order to maximize the in-focusness of the stuff you want most in focus.  :)  Individual frames are cheap these days. Burn though a whole bunch of 'em and find out what works for you. The math can come later.

-Dave-
Title: Re: Hyperfocal focusing: double the distance to the nearest object
Post by: E.J. Peiker on March 16, 2018, 08:38:12 am
I keep hearing about the following as a way to keep as much as possible of the scene in focus:  take the distance to the nearest object you want in focus and double it.  This makes no sense to me.  I understand focusing a third of the way in--that's somewhat supported by the dof tables.  But how can this double the distance work when it doesn't take into account how far the farthest objects in the scene are?  Hope someone can explain!
All that does is approximate that the nearest thing and the farthest thing are of equal focus, it does not guarantee that they are both appear to be in focus.  That will depend on the aperture you select.  If you take out a hyperfocal calculator, you will notice that the nearest point that the calculator says is in focus comes out to be half of the hyperfocal distance.  The statement you made is simply the reciprocal of that.  But, as you know, the hyperfocal point and the near and far point that will still appear sharp changes with aperture (assuming a fixed focal length of course)

As an example, if I want something that is 10 feet away and still sharp at infinity and I simply set focus to 20 feet and don't worry about aperture, it simply says that 5 feet and infinity will be of equal focus - that could be equally out of focus if the aperture selected for the focal length you are using does not support the needed DOF.
Title: Re: Hyperfocal focusing: double the distance to the nearest object
Post by: BAB on March 19, 2018, 07:48:44 pm
With a 28mm (21mm) lens on a medium format camera H6D 100 for object at near10' and far infinity you would focus at 20.1' using F/10. But with a 50mm (35mm) lens you would have to near focus 9.70 ft and far infinity focus at 19.2 ft at F/18.

This clearly illustrates the importance of the F stop the image is shot at Higher that 50mm lens it becomes nearly impossible to have sharp focus at 10' and also at infinity without making several images with different focus points. I suggest you to invest in the app lumiriver as all sensors and lens vary in the exact calculations, it will give you F/stop, near, far and focus.

regards