View Single Post
  #7  
Old 20-09-12, 06:04 PM
jellyfire jellyfire is offline
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2012
Posts: 6
Hi, on a 30 sec exposure the wind can definitely have an effect, hanging your camera bag off the tripod or even against a leg to weigh it down can help. Using a tripod and self timer you should definitely be able to get more overall sharpness.

Hyperfocal is confusing until you get your head round it. Try and google it until you find an explanation that makes sense to you, sometimes it all seems like gobbledegook, but Ive seen a couple of articles which strip it rich down to basics. For a landscape shot, the easiest way is to use something like f16-f18, so you get a decent range of depth of field, and then focus about a third of the way up (on your images that would be the reflections on the beach). It seems odd as you'd think you'd want the lights of the buildings sharp, but using that method you'll get pretty much the whole scene sharp.

It might help to think of the basic idea below, which Ive simplified a lot but is more or less right:

Focus on the horizon = the nearest point will be very out of focus
Focus on the foreground = the horizon will be quite out of focus
Focus on a third of the way up the image = foreground in focus and horizon in focus

The aperture you choose makes the above rule more or less apparent - so f1.4 would make it very apparent, and f18 would make it less pronounced

Hope that doenst sound too confusing. If you're going to shoot landscapes its something thats really handy to understand, and will help you get much sharper images
Reply With Quote