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Education Field Instructional

Where to Focus When Shooting Landscape Photography

Joy Celine Asto
No Comments
09/13/2018
2 Mins read
landscape-photography-iq-tutorial

Last Updated on 09/20/2018 by Mark Beckenbach

Wondering where is the focusing sweet spot when it comes landscape photography? This quick video tutorial holds the answer!

One of the most crucial things about landscape photography is setting your focus right to get everything in your frame in sharp focus. This allows you to give your viewers an accurate representation of what you saw in the scene. Not quite sure how to achieve this? We have just the right video tutorial for you.

Where to place the focus is actually one of the most commonly asked questions about landscape photography, and it’s easy to see why. Focus too close and you fail to sharply capture all the beautiful elements in your horizon. Focus too far and you miss all the interesting details in the foreground. But there’s a sweet spot where everything in your frame is in the right focus, as explained to us in the quick video below by Tom Mackie of Landscape Photography iQ:

In the video, we learn that getting everything tack-sharp isn’t simply setting your camera’s focus to infinity. The trick lies in knowing about how depth of field works. In apertures between f5.6 to f22, we get an increased depth of field that produces acceptable sharpness from the area closest to the camera to infinity. The smaller the size of your aperture, the greater the depth of field.

An aperture of f14 (more or less) would produce just the right depth of field for a scene where the nearest element is moderately close to the camera, just like what we have in the video. Next is to determine where exactly to place the focus point itself. Setting it to the closest element, which is the nearest hay bale, will make the infinity out of focus. But when you focus on infinity, you’re extending that depth of field to beyond infinity (as absurd as that sounds), which is a total waste. The sweet spot, therefore, is a third of the scene from where you’re taking the shot.

Do check out the Landscape Photography iQ YouTube channel for more landscape photography tips and tutorials.

 

Screenshot image from the video by Landscape Photography iQ

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