How I get PIN SHARP PHOTOS from front to back

in this video we're going to talk all about focus and getting super sharp images and look at this view it's absolutely amazing i'm on the rim of an inactive volcano not an active one but at the moment i'm going to focus on my apple [Music] morning everybody and welcome to my series on iceland and in this video we're going to talk all about focus and getting sharp images and i've got a real treat because we're going to hike up to a volcano rim there's been quite a lot of low cloud and it's been really foggy for about three or four hours but it's clear in i think it's going to be good let's see what we can get all right i think i've got everything let's go actually some blue [Music] so most people in landscape photography want their photos to be sharp front to back and edge to edge and lots of factors that come into that biggest one is focus and depth of field and that's what i'm going to talk about mostly in in this video but you've also got to remember that it depends on your lenses as well if you have a really poor lens then at the edges it's probably not going to be as sharp so in terms of focus there's one thing the elephant in the room which is hyper focal distance and i don't really think about that at all but it's really useful um to just talk about it briefly right at the start and then um you know if we refer to it we know what we're talking about um mostly in this video i'm going to show you examples so i'm going to share three or four examples in different locations the hyperfocal distance is the closest point at which the furthest away thing is in focus that's the easiest way to explain it if you go forward focus closer than that hyperfocal distance then your mountains aren't going to be in focus i don't think about it that much at all hardly ever but one thing i do think about all the time is depth of field and how important depth of field is in landscape photography so that is at the point you focus on how much behind and in front of that point is in focus okay let's go and find this um volcano rim what a beautiful day to be hiking [Music] oh wow so that volcano over there um is called myfell and um i pronounced that wrong i know but i have an epic morning there um in a future video so stay tuned for that in the coming few weeks so there's one more thing i just want to say about focus before we do an example i don't want to talk about field of view and how that impacts focal length et cetera there's lots of complicated science behind it um and i'm sure some of the comments say focal length doesn't impact depth of field but for this for the purposes of this the things that you need to care about for depth of field or your sensor size your focal length where you focus and your aperture and all those impact the ultimate depth of field how much you're going to get in focus in your shot so if you think about those and i'll show you how to use the app you just can't fail to get sharp images and and it also helps you to know when you need to focus stack because sometimes you do and sometimes you don't by the end of this video you're gonna know exactly how to get super sharp images right let's start with the simplest example and that is something that's far away there's nothing in the foreground and we'll take maya fell that volcano over there as an example spoil for volcanoes at the moment this is the one we're hiking on the right hand side but we'll take that one as an example so i've just had a quick look on google maps it's two kilometers away roughly so if i put in here that the subject distance is two kilometers and say we focus just for argument's sake on myfill and say we just focus at f 2.8 so the shallowest depth of field i've got on my 200 millimeter lens so 200 millimeters f 2.8 two kilometers away what this is telling me is that everything to infinity so and beyond don't cry jokes everything to infinity um and all the way back to 382 meters away we'll be in focus at f 2.8 if i go to say f 8 which is probably a good idea because it's probably the sharpest point of the lens then everything 250 millimeters away 150 meters away is in focus so actually as long as i don't have anything you know of these little hills here anything in the valley is going to be in focus if i focus on my felt at any aperture so you know people get worried about sometimes oh do i need it on f11 if i'm shooting something a long way away with a 200 millimeter lens quite often the answer is no but you can check photo pills now we're going to get some more complicated examples but that's a super simple one to start with and whilst we're at it i think it's probably worth a photo so i'll set my long lens up okay so i've got my 200 millimeter lens on now you can see that it's filling the frame pretty much and i'm gonna shoot one f13 and i'm also going to shoot one at f 2.8 and i'll show the results [Music] actually for this particular image we need to get the best image we actually want to get in some of the nice um foreground in the thing so probably zoom out a little bit and probably just go to about there which is about 85 millimeters as soon as you zoom out like that then that's going to give us more depth of field in the image um and we can look at photo pills and and have a look at that i'm not going to in this case but we're going to look at a different example similar to this higher up so i'm going to take the shot i think it looks pretty good there's a stream just down here so i'll probably go into portrait and um let's just move into portrait now so if i just just rotate this round here we go you can see that i just moved down a bit probably zoom in a bit and i just like that going through the bottom just setting the frame so that looks pretty good gonna be a little bit careful as a glacier in the background i don't want to burn it out the histogram looks okay always on your histogram check there's nothing that you're missing i'm gonna could do it about there that's pretty good i wanted to i want to get the sharpest part my lens because if you look at the lens it's sharper at sort of a an f around f8 usually for most lenses so i'm going to focus on my fell and i know for sure now i'm shooting at 135 millimeters even at f 2.8 that everything's going to be in focus because it's all such a long way away that's pretty good right onward to this beast up here [Music] it's a hard thing to know [Music] i've just spied a great little scene just just to the left of my fellow so just doing that and i really like this diagonal line of this hill coming down here and then this river going up here um and then the mountains in the background so you know again everything's so far away i'm shooting at 135 millimeters i just don't need to worry about it too much um i can focus pretty much anywhere and everything will be in focus but it looks really nice that's nice little sort of i don't know it's just a nice little compact scene with lots of diagonals and the cloud at the top just anchors it just looks so nice [Music] can things ever [Music] oh i'm getting closer now whoa there's a good waterfall there whoa so we're going up there to this volcano rim here it's gonna be so interesting seeing that after the live volcano that i saw earlier in the week another video to come soon and that oh that is epic yeah not far to go now oh my what all the things so this is this is pretty cool i'm sure we can find lots of compositions here so what we'll do is look for super wide we'll go to the other end of um the spectrum and try and get something really close up focus on some detail that's really close to the camera and focus on getting that in focus and the rest of the scene in focus um and we'll try and do it two ways one just in one shot and the other one when we get a bit closer focus stacking okay so i'm just being really careful because i don't want to damage anything down here but we've got these little flowers down here now i couldn't find i was hoping there was going to be a bigger flower because i've seen quite a lot of them there's one over there but it's not close enough to the edge so we'll do two shots with it we'll do one which is i'm about one and a half meters away from it at the moment and um so you think one half million meters away 40 millimeters you know what do you focus on do you focus on the flower do you focus on the mountain well if we can put it into um photo pills we'll say one kilometer away we focus at one kilometer which is the mountain probably is about that maybe a little bit closer um f8 14 millimeters and it's telling us that the near focus point now i like to always think double that near focus point because then you're super safe but that is point that'll be 1.6 meters away so this this this flower if we focus on that mountain will still be in focus but the other thing is if you're a little bit unsure then you can use that's where you can use the hyperfocal distance but you you'd want to go double the hyperfocal distance so if the hyperfocal distance in this case is 0.8 meters then you want to go double that so i go way past it i go probably triple that so you could focus down there somewhere and then you'd be super safe you get the mountain in focus and the flower in focus so something like this 14 millimeters is just not difficult um you can get that floor in focus now what we want though is to get really close to the flower okay you can see we're a lot closer now we're only about 40 centimeters away i'd say from the flower so there's no combination of seconds it's going to get everything in focus so if we're 40 centimeters away then i just need to put in 14 millimeters f9 and we'll just put in the subject distance is point four point four meters and that says that it's going to focus at f9 all the way to 80 centimeters so not that far so we're gonna have to focus here and probably a little bit further as well just to get everything in focus so um what i can also do is i can put in the mounting so if i put in the mountain so we'll say um what's the mounting of 1000 meters and we'll put in f9 we'll say we put in f13 it's going to get us to 50 centimeters away so actually there's going to be a bit of a crossover there so we can focus on here focus on the mountain and actually is going to be a crossover in the focal planes and that means that we'll be able to focus that out really easily but just to be safe what i will do is i will focus here a little bit further up maybe here and then on the mountain as well and then um i've done videos before on focus stacking there's also videos in masterclass 1 and masterclass 2 on focus stacking so check out those it's fairly simple to do to be honest and here's the result [Music] it's good to have an apple um i just found it in my bag what a bonus i didn't think i packed it i was walking up thinking differently about my apple that's not good um well i'm at the top now i think the best view of the crater is over there because also you get a nice view of the waterfall as well so i'm gonna go back on the way back down and take that um the light's just not i mean it's not bad the clouds are amazing but i was hoping for a little bit of outbreak of light in the distance um mila fell looks good over there so i'll probably shoot that again with a long lens um and also this sort of moss here is really nice um so i'm probably going to shoot some of that but yeah look at this ah absolutely incredible isn't it absolutely incredible so when i've shot this moss um we'll walk back down and i'll show you some more examples from around iceland of how you can make sure you get super sharp shots [Music] [Music] i am worthy [Music] so i've just um on my way back down i was just some different compositions and i found something really nice i actually really like it and it's really difficult conditions at the moment because it's sort of quite flat light there's a the clouds are quite good but there's just no definition in the light um and for landscapes like this where you've got foregrounds with rocks i like it to be sort of side lit by low light and so my golden light looks so good and also the snow is just patchy and difficult so i try to incorporate the snow in this shot i think it works quite well so it's a little bit wider than this in the photo but basically i've got this band of snow here i've got the war the sort of stone coming in here and then i've got this band of snow on the right-hand side which balances this band and then these other bands of snow are just quite nice in the background obviously we've got this brilliant waterfall and then this sort of horseshoe in terms of focus because there's nothing super super close then um i have done a focus stack on it but it is on 40 millimeters and as we know at 40 millimeters you've got a really wide field of view so um the f-13 which is what i've shot at i think it's shot on the mountain down to about six to 70 centimeters away would be in focus um but i've shot the mountain i've shot five meters away as well just to bring that close bit of focus closer but still keep the sharp element on the mountain the colours here are stunning though really stunning the reds and this greens there we go [Music] okay so this is a pretty good example for focus um we've got a amazing waterfall now if you were just going to shoot the waterfall it's as far in the distance than mata's shooting at sort of the wider focal lengths that doesn't really matter whether you use f 2.8 or f 11. when we want to get a bit of foreground in so i've got a bit of foreground down here so if we just have a look at this [Music] so say we want to get this foreground in here you know you start then starting to think where do i focus and you think you start to panic because you know there's this foreground bit there's a background bit you don't want to have to focus stack it because it might be quite complicated so you think like okay what am i going to do so the key thing here is just to understand when you focus on the waterfall which is effectively infinity how close does the focus come okay so we've got photo pills here and i've got 200 meters away which is roughly the waterfall whether i put 200 or infinity it wouldn't matter so 200 meters away f11 24 millimeters z7 all those things matter because the sensor size matters um as does the focal length so it's saying now that the um depth of field near limit is 1.7 meters away so 1.7 meters away will be exceptionally sharp now for me that's not good enough um so i i sort of want to be well within the comforts of that really so that means that we can't just focus on the waterfall now obviously we just focused on the the flower in the very foreground here the waterfall probably won't be in focus so what we've got to do then is you've got to look at the hyperfocal distance and that the hyper focal distance effectively allows you to get the maximum depth of field if you focus on that point but if you do if you miss that out if you come too close from the hyperfocal distance then the waterfall might be out of focus so what we want to do is either double the hyperfocal distance and then try and find a point which is there and in this case the hyperfocal distance is 1.7 meters away so if you focus 3.4 meters away then that'll get the waterfall in focus and then everything to about a meter away in focus and that's going to be fine so it doesn't have to be exact but roughly if you focus three meters away and in this case that would be somewhere where these plants are here so if we just look at this it's going to be somewhere i don't know you could pace it out as long as you don't paste it with waterfall one two three so these pla these flowers down here then all of this will be in focus because it'll come back all the way to one meter and the background will be in focus as [Music] well [Music] okay i hope you enjoyed that video on focus from iceland um one of the things that i didn't get across very well was hyper focal distance and just how important it is to be careful about that if you come too far forward from the hyperfocal distance when you focus your mountains won't be in focus and actually even if you focus on the hyperfocal distance your mountains won't be pinched up they'll be acceptably sharp not pin sharp um and that's one of the key things with the photopills that when you put in a distance the distance is it shows so that that nearest point of focus which i probably didn't get across very well there is is just acceptably sharp it's not pin sharp and that's why i was doubling distances um just to be safe anyway i'll leave you with some footage from the next few weeks from iceland because i'm so excited about sharing it all with you i've got some really really great shots and i can't wait to show you them so until next sunday [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 132,713

Keywords: photography, focus, how to focus, where to focus, photography focusing, landscape photography, landscape photography focus, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: OM3P8Ntcr34

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021