Hyperfocal high jinks
Matthew Richards shows how setting the hyperfocal distance can enhance sharpness throughout your frame
Maximize sharpness in your scenes
Setting the focus distance of a lens to the hyperfocal distance will give you the greatest sharpness from infinity to the closest possible point in a scene. This makes it a very popular option with landscape photographers, when they want to retain sharpness in everything from foreground areas to the distant horizon.
Two principal factors of hyperfocal distance are the focal length of the lens and its aperture setting. With shorter focal lengths or zoom settings, the hyperfocal distance becomes shorter. You’ll therefore be able to get more foreground sharpness when using a wide-angle lens. The hyperfocal distance also decreases with narrower aperture settings, thanks to a larger depth of field.
Another factor that affects hyperfocal distance is the size of the image sensor. For any given focal length and aperture setting, a DX format camera with an APS-C type sensor will have a much shorter hyperfocal length than an FX full-frame. Even after taking the 1.5x focal length multiplier or crop factor into account, a DX camera will still have a shorter hyperfocal distance. For example, shooting with a 16mm lens on a DX body gives the same ‘effective’ focal length as using a 24mm lens on an FX body. Using both at an aperture setting of f/5.6, the hyperfocal distance would be 2.4m with a DX camera, but 3.5m on an FX.
The final issue that affects hyperfocal distance is the ‘circle of confusion’. This equates to the width of a pinprick of light when reproduced in a shot. The smaller the diameter, the sharper the focus. At any focus setting, a lens can only be perfectly focused for one distance. So the circle of confusion represents an ‘acceptable’ level of sharpness, upon which depth of field and the hyperfocal distance are based.
Front to back
Ideal for architectural and landscape photography, setting a lens to the hyperfocal distance retains sharpness in the closest possible objects without sacrificing sharpness in the distant horizon. When set, the depth of field extends from half the hyperfocal distance all the way to infinity. So if the hyperfocal distance is 10m, the depth of field would be 5m to infinity.
Focal length
Hyperfocal distance decreases at shorter focal lengths. For example, if you use a DX camera with an 18mm zoom setting and an aperture of f/11, the hyperfocal distance is just 1.5m. Everything in a scene would therefore be rendered sharply from 75cm to infinity.
Aperture priority
It’s important to keep control over the aperture setting when using hyperfocal distance. You’ll therefore need to shoot in Aperture Priority or Manual mode. Shutter speeds can become slow when using narrow apertures to decrease the hyperfocal distance, for greater depth of field. A handy way of avoiding this is to select your camera’s Auto ISO option.
The ‘third’ option
You’ll find that you don’t need to retain sharpness all the way to infinity, especially when shooting indoors. Even outside, a frame may not have a distant background. Depth of field extends further behind the point of focus than in front of it, so a good rule of thumb is to focus on a point that’s about a third of the way into the scene.
The distance
There are a variety of charts, apps and web-based tools for calculating depth of field and hyperfocal distance. Here’s one that we created for a number of popular focal lengths and aperture settings, for both DX and FX format cameras. We’ve used 50mm as the maximum focal length, as setting the hyperfocal distance is less practical with telephoto lenses.
Adjust the focus
Autofocus lenses have a short amount of rotational travel in their focus ring, this makes it hard to set the hyperfocal distance exactly. Manual focus lenses, like this Zeiss Milvus, tend to have longer focus travel. If you align the infinity symbol with the left aperture line to set the hyperfocal distance, the closest sharp distance is shown by the corresponding right aperture line.