DOF essential

This was a very unusual autumn foliage shot I captured in Utah a couple of weeks ago.  Photographers are used to seeing golden leaves mixed in with orange, red, and green, but the addition of the blue color of the sage at the bottom made this unique.  Even though the two-dimensionality of this picture makes it look like there was little depth, the opposite was true.  The sage and each layer of trees were at varying distances from the camera, an that meant that depth of field was an important consideration.  Landscape images, almost without exception, require everything to be sharp.  Therefore, I used two techniques to get complete depth of field here:  (1)  I used a wide angle lens instead of a telephoto for the composition, and (2) I selected f/14 for the lens aperture.  I wasn't using a tripod -- I had a momentary bout of laziness -- so I compensated with raising the ISO a bit to 500 which enabled the fairly small aperture.  In addition, I chose a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second to freeze the branches and leaves that were moving due to the wind.