To infinity and back a bit

Use this technique to make more of a scene appear sharply focused

Although you can only focus a lens at a single distance, that doesn’t mean that everything in front of and beyond this point is blurred. Sharpness appears to drop off gradually, with the depth of apparent sharpness – aka the depth of field – being determined by the aperture setting and focus distance, amongst other things.

Approximately one third of the depth of field falls in front of the point of focus, with two-thirds extending behind it. This means that if you focus on the closest part of a scene then you’ll essentially be wasting the depth of field available in front of it and losing some behind. That’s not necessarily a problem when you want a subject to stand out from a background, such as when you’re shooting a portrait. But when you’re photographing a landscape or any other general scene, you’re more likely to want to squeeze as much as possible into the depth of field.

The trick here is to manually focus the lens at the ‘hyperfocal’ distance; everything from half the hyperfocal distance to infinity will then appear acceptably sharp. There are plenty of depth of field apps that can calculate the hyperfocal distance for you once you’ve input your camera, lens and aperture details – all three will help to determine the distance you need to focus at – although working with a lens that has a distance scale on the barrel is going to make life much easier. The distance markings on modern lenses aren’t typically very detailed, but at least you can place the focus point somewhere in the ballpark of the hyperfocal distance.