Landscape Photography: 5 Focus Techniques

Landscape Photography  •  Photography Tips

Getting the best focus while shooting landscapes isn’t always easy. Imagine standing at a beautiful vista with a fantastic foreground, mid-ground and background. You’d definitely want to have all of the scene in focus. So where in the world do you focus to have most of the scene looking sharp? We’ve all faced such a dilemma. In this video, landscape photographer Thomas Heaton explains 5 of his approaches for focusing when shooting landscapes:

A simple and effective way to ensure a greater depth of field when shooting landscapes is to set the lens to focus at infinity. Then, when you set the aperture to about f/9-f/11 you’ll notice that most of the scene will appear quite sharp. This technique works great if you don’t have anything interesting that you want to stand out. But if you do have a particular subject that you want to catch the viewer’s eye, simply set your focus point on it.

Sometimes the scene in front of you can be so tempting that you’d want to have everything from the front to the back in sharp focus. For this kind of scenario, you can explore a technique called focus stacking. You will need to take multiple shots, each taken by focusing at different regions, and later blend them in post. If you’re not a fan of the process, another effective way is to set your focus point somewhere about one-third to half way into the scene, and set the aperture to about f/9-f/11. This is usually where the hyperfocal distance lies that maximizes the depth of filed.

The next time you’re out shooting some landscape photos, be sure to try these focusing techniques. You’ll be surprised by how effective simple methods like these can be.