Some time ago, I written about how I manually focus my photos, and today I will show you a different way to get the best DOF using the Hyperfocal distance.

What is Hyperfocal distance

In simplest terms, Hyperfocal distance is a distance on which you have to focus your lens, to get the maximum amount of DOF. To say it differently, it’s the closes distance on which you can focus, while still archive a good sharpness for objects at infinity.

The Hyperfocal distance is of course not the same for all situations, as it is dependent in the sensor size, aperture used and focal length. Each time one of these changes, the Hyperfocal distance becomes different.

Additionaly, there is one more parameter, the Circle of confusion. This one is only dependent on the sensor and can be found specifically for every camera. The circle of confusion, is the size a point in the scene can make on your sensor, for it still to appear sharp. The more out of focus it its, the bigger it appears on the sensor. You may know that as bokeh. In some calculators of Hyperfocal distance you can change this value, in some it uses one base on the sensor size. It’s always best to check the one that is exact for you camera.

How to calculate the Hyperfocal distance

You can get yourself the equations an calculate it yourself, but the simplest way is to just print yourself a table with the values (which you can find easily on the internet) or even better use a Hyperfocal calculator app. Here is an example of a table, I made for my camera 5D mark II, simply using the Hyperfocal Pro app for Android.

You can see here the different distances for combinations of aperture and focal length.

How to use the Hyperfocal distance

So what now when you know the distance? You turn of auto-focus on your lens, and focus on that distance. You sometimes need to do this just approximately, as the distance scale on a lens is not so detailed. Now you will get everything from half that distance to infinity into focus. I would suggest doing the composition first and having the camera on a tripod, as without that it’s hard to maintain that distance. Also each time you change the aperture or the focal length, you have to recalculate and refocus.

When to use it

It’s great when you need to have an exact idea about the DOF to get the maximum sharpness. Especially if you are trying to take a photo that includes a foreground element and should be sharp into infinity. In all the other cases, it should be sufficient to focus one third into the scene to get a good result.

I found myself by the Apollo bridge today, and while wanting to take some sunset shots in the area, the sunset just wasn’t so interesting. So I decided to go under the bridge. I just really like that spot :)

While taking this photos, I thought about the aperture. I tend to use a quite low one when shooting night cityscapes. It’s mostly a custom from before I used magic lantern, as there the longest shot had to be under 30 seconds, and partially lack of patience, as I hate to wait few minutes for a single shot. But here I bumped up the aperture to F11 and decided to wait for how long it takes. And I really like the result, the overall sharpness, and the beautiful softness of the water. Looks like I will use a smaller aperture more often :)

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 5, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 16mm, Aperture: 11, Middle exposure time: 49s, ISO: 200, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.135918, 17.128131

For todays process post, I decided to show you a photo that is not a HDR, but where I was forced to use focus blending, and I had to deal with not enough shots taken. So let’s get started.

This is a view of the SNP bridge in Bratislava, as seen from the Bratislava castle.

Finished photo

Original photo

I took two series for this, just to be sure, one focused on the bars, one on the bridge in the background. When looking at them in Lightroom, I found out that I need just one from booth, and one brighter fore few tweaks, so I just cropped the image, corrected the horizon, white balance and opened the two images in Photoshop.

All exposures

Used exposures corrected in Lightroom

I don’t know what I was thinking while taking this shot, as of course just focusing twice here is not enough. The problem is, hat if you try to blend two shots like this, the foreground element will get bigger when its out of focus, and that will not allow for a nice blend. You can see it in the first screen-shot from Photoshop here. The blend produces an ugly soft border around everything. So I needed to do something more, and this is what I did.

1. The shot focused on the background
2. Copy of layer 1, as I needed to experiment with edits, and I didn’t want to open the layer over and over again (I will explain the edits in a moment :))
3. The shot focused on the foreground. Using layers, I painted out all the content one can see through the bars
4+5. Here I used the brighter exposure, to brighten the bars, and then used a second layer mask on the group, so the effect is not inside the bars
6. Color efex Pro contrast, to get more local contrast and detail in the photo.
7. Color efex Tonal contrast on the borders and the background, as it still was very low contrast, due to it snowing at that moment.
8. A little overall contrast using curves.

Blending problem

All edits in Photoshop

Now this take care of all the detail and contrast, but there is still the problem with the bad blending. So what I did, on the second layer, I selected one by one the openings in the bars and made the image inside bigger. Like this the border disappeared behind the bars, and I got a nice blend. I had to be careful so the bridge and the road line up after the resize.

Here you can see the second and third layers, to better show this.

Second layer after resizing

Third layer after masking

Btw. if I did this correctly, I would take more shots, with different focus, or I would use a smaller aperture.

And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

Another one from my archives today. I so can’t wait for a better weather to start and get some nice new shots again :)

This is a HDR from 7 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 7, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 45mm, Aperture: 2.8, Middle exposure time: 2s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.136873, 17.104699

Video tutorials

You know that I offer video tutorials for sale on this blog, but I also watch a lot of them from many other photographers. Right now I’m watching the Trey Ratcliff’s Complete HDR Tutorial, The Ultimate Landscape Photography Course by Jay and Varina Patel and the Cityscape tutorial by Beboy. I like to switch from one to another, as sometimes watching one in a row is hard, as they are quite long. Especially the one from Beboy is a little problematic for me, as it’s in French, and I don’t speak any French :). But since I have quite a lot of knowledge of Photoshop already, I can watch it and get almost everything he is showing there. It just take a little longer.

There is always something more to learn. In taking and in editing photos. What are you currently learning? Or what video series are you watching? Feel free to share in the comments.

Moon over Bratislava

Still haven’t done many new photos this year. The weather in Bratislava is nothing spectacular right now, and my travels for this year will start a little later. So for now, another one from my library, taken around 2 years ago :)

Btw. this was really taken at f2.8. It was quite late after sunset, and it was really dark.

Technique: Oloneo Photoengine, Number of exposures: 6, Camera Model: Canon EOS 5D mark II, Lens: Canon 24-70mm F2.8, Focal length: 42mm, Aperture: 2.8, Middle exposure time: 4s, ISO: 400, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.136873, 17.104699