The Hill Country around Austin, Texas is spectacular in the Spring. Bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush carpet large areas, and it’s truly visual overload. On my first trip to this area in the 90’s, I hit the peak of the bloom perfectly. For landscape photography, when I’m close to foreground elements, I consistently use f/32 for maximum depth of field unless I’m doing focus stacking. In the 90’s, of course, focus stacking didn’t exist. The question I’m asked all the time is where in the frame do you focus? When foreground flowers are, say, 3 or 4 feet in front of the lens, this is a relevant question. The answer is this: I take the focal length of the lens, say 24mm, and divide it by 3. The answer is 8, so I focus 8 feet away. At f/32, this is the maximum depth of field possible given the lens, the aperture, and the composition. This is virtually identical to the hyper focal distance.
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