Focusing for Landscape Photography - Course Preview

One of the most vexing problems is trying to figure out how to get everything in your photograph sharp from near to far. If you're doing wildlife or people photography, focusing is usually pretty easy because you're relying on selective focus, where you have your subject sharp and in focus but the background is nicely blurred. So it's pretty simple. You just focus on your subject, choose a wide-open aperture, a big aperture like f/2.8 or f/4, and your subject's gonna be nice and sharp and in focus, and everything else around your subject will be artistically blurred, and that's pretty easy to do. But if you're shooting landscape where you need to have everything from often very close to you to very, very far away, for example, in this scene, I've got some rocks here in the foreground that are maybe about four or five feet away from my camera lens, and then I've got the background scene which is several hundred feet away. Sometimes when I'm making photographs, I'll have a background scene that's several miles away. You've gotta make sure that you have a zone of focus, of apparent focus, of sharpness that extends from very, very close to you to very, very far away. So you can't just focus on your subject because it's not really entirely clear in a scene like this what your subject is. Is my subject the foreground, these rock formations that are a few feet away? Is my subject the background? I think it's fair to say that with a landscape scene, the entire scene is your subject, so you wanna make sure everything is in focus.