how or where to focus

Yes. AKA “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch”, or TNSTAAFL

Yeah. “You spent all of that money on your camera stuff, so give us the great pictures we want.”

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Do some test shots with your preferred focal length. Generally, you will not notice diffraction in the result even at f/11 (on full frame), and Darktable’s capture sharpening can correct for a lot of it.

Figure out a practical approximate hyperfocal distance range, one you can gauge just by eyeballing the scene and picking a focus point.

FWIW, I shoot landscapes at f/6.3 on micro 4/3 with no problems, and on full frame I would not hesitate to go f/13 or narrower.

EDIT forgot this: you do not always want everything super-sharp even if you don’t want blur. Especially background elements like foliage and grass, they distract from the foreground and can lend a certain unwelcome busyness to the image, especially with modern lenses which can be painfully sharp.

This is worst in my experience with waxy leaves (you will see them in the wild in dryer climates mostly), they give you specular reflections. In post you can dampen that (D&S, contrast equalizer, …), but you might as well just defocus that area a tiny bit, which will not be perceived as “blur”.

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I first want to emphasize that there is no right or wrong here, but it’s still interesting to me how much variation there is in what people want from a photo. Enthusiast photographers typically don’t want everything in sharp focus (in this scenario) because separation is key for impact, yet many non-photographers just want the scene captured in as much detail as possible as a record of where they were. Anything blurry is considered a flaw.

I know it might sound like heresy, but have you considered just using your phone for these snapshots of your family in front of a scene? I sometimes just take those pics as a record of time and place because it does exactly what you say your family wants: now, quick and everything in focus.

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It works well for me. I can see a difference and use it pretty much all of the time now. It is when I compare one to the other F stop that I was surprised.

Yes - true - expectations can be high.

on my todo

Ahh - I didn’t want to bring the phone into the mix. I’ve tried many times and I was told many times that the phone can do it. Very very few times I am actually happy with what comes out of it. I usually delegate it to my daughter. She does better than me with the phone.

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? Heinlein ?

I don’t know of such a reference. I heard it used mainly in engineering and software development contexts, but it seems to me to apply to just about everything in life.

Almost … TANSTAAFL … There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch :slight_smile:

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I was going to say this too - see this article I wrote on the subject. I don’t know if your scene is conducive to it, but using a wide-angle lens (e.g. wider than 18mm) will make it pretty difficult to not have everything sharp (I was really surprised by how much this helped me).

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Yes, I don’t really like using it either, but I’ve made my peace with just using it on occasion, usually when there’s a danger of the family getting annoyed with me. For serious photography, I have to be on my own or with a fellow enthusiast because my family is not waiting for me!

I love my Canon G16 for street photography at night time. F1.8 has incredible DoF because of the 6mm lens focal length. Shallow depth of field is the reward or curse of the full frame compared to smaller sensors. Depends what you want to achieve. No free lunch as they say.

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Doing the calculations, I think this is an impossible problem on full frame, something has to give. Either you go to a wider lens (eg 24mm at f/10, focus at the hyperfocal 2m, 1m–\infty will be in focus), decrease aperture further, or increase distance to the subject.

FWIW, my preferred landscape-with-person setup on micro 4/3 is 25mm (50mm equiv FF) with f/6.3, focusing at around 5m, everything between 3–20m will be sharp, and far hills and trees will be a tiny bit blurred but they would not be sharp anyway because atmospheric effects etc. You can increase apparent sharpness/local contrast easily in Darktable.