28 Jul
2011

Posted in: Outdoor Photographer Blog
By Ian Plant    2 Comments

Hyperfocal Distance

My most recent post to the Outdoor Photographer magazine blog, Hyperfocal Distance, gives some tips for finding the optimal focal point and aperture to ensure sharp near-to-far focus in your landscape photos. The following image of wildflowers below Mt. Saint Helens is used to illustrate the post.

"Explosion" - Mt. Saint Helens, Washington

I decided to get close—really close—to the foreground flowers in order to create an interesting and colorful foreground. I also got really low in order to obscure much of the middle-ground, which was featureless dark soil. Because Mt. Saint Helens looms so large in the background, I was able to use a wide-angle lens without the mountain getting too small relative to the rest of the scene. Although the sunset light wasn’t as colorful as I would have liked, overall it wasn’t that bad either, and the colors of the flowers really pop and more than compensate. I can’t remember exactly, but I probably focused somewhere in the vicinity of five feet away and stopped down to f/16 in order to maximize depth-of-field and ensure sharp focus from near to far. Because I was using my bulbous Nikon 14-24mm lens (adapted to my Canon camera), I wasn’t able to use a graduated neutral density filter, so I manually blended two exposures (one for the sky and one for the landscape) in Photoshop using the technique I outline in my Basic Blending Techniques instructional video. I then used a multiply mode layer to restore the drama and color to the sky seen by the eye, as described in my Multiply Mode Blends instructional video. Both videos are available for sale on my e-store.

Technical details: Canon 5D Mark II camera, 14-24mm lens (@17mm), ISO 800, f/16, 1/5 & 1 second exposures manually blended in Photoshop.

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About Ian Plant  (275 Posts)

Ian Plant's photographs and instructional articles have appeared in a number of books, calendars, and magazines, including Outdoor Photographer and Popular Photography. Ian writes a regular blog column for Outdoor Photographer online, and he is the author of numerous instructional eBooks and digital processing tutorials. Ian leads several photo tours each year.