Maximum Sharpness for your Photos
February 12, 2010 | Landscape Photography | by Michael Breitung
Ok again just a short post dealing with how to get the best sharpness for your landscape images. It’s more of a sum-up of some articles I read in the past. I will add some links at the end of this post.
The essence is when shooting landscape images, where you want a nice crisp foreground leading the viewer into the picture and also want detail in the middle and background, you want the whole scene as sharp as possible! The way to get the maximum sharpness in your images is not to use the smallest apperture of your lense. This may leed to Diffraction which decreases the overall sharpnes of your image. Most lenses are sharpest in the middle range between f/9-f/16. This varies from lense to lense so the best is to test your lense and check for it’s sweet spot.
When you know this the second thing you need to know is where to focus your camera. There’s a principle called the “hyperfocal distance” which roughly suggests that you should focus your camera on a third way into your scene to get the best dof. The reason is, that the dof extends further behind the focal point than in front of it.
Since when going for best sharpness you should use a tripod in any case, you can also take it one step further and use focus stacking to get even more sharpness. There’s a nice Video on The Mindful Eye describing how to go about it. You might need to register an account there to view the videos but since it’s free and the community there is just great this is a thing I suggest anyway 😉
And here are some links:
