Photography For Beginners - Hyperfocal Distance

Would you like to get the maximum depth-of-field possible for your photography with your film or digital SLR? Not sure how? You need to know about something called Hyperfocal Distance. This will in-turn teach you about the Hyperfocal Point and these two together will enable you get more depth in your photographs.

First, what is hyperfocal distance? It can be defined as follows: Hyperfocal Distance is the distance between the lens and the closest point of suitably sharp focus when the lens is focused at infinity. When focused for the hyperfocal distance depth-of-field extends from half this distance to infinity. What we get from this definition is the hyperfocal point: The hyperfocal point is the location of the closest point of suitably sharp focus.

Now this sounds a little technical but it is very easy to put into practice. Suppose your subject is at the approximate location of the hyperfocal point and you have a fairly shallow depth-of-field towards your camera and would like to increase it. Well you can without compromising your photograph in any way.

The point to all the above is this. When you focus on infinity you are actually wasting some valuable depth-of-field. Your depth-of-field allowance at your particular f-number is actually extending beyond infinity. Take a moment to grasp this concept; forget about the principles of infinity and look at it this way. Your lens still has depth-of-field capability when focused at infinity. The amount of additional depth-of-field available to you is equal to the same distance as your hyperfocal point to infinity.

We can use this optical understanding to pull back the entire range of depth-of-field, including that beyond infinity, and use it in our photograph to achieve much greater depth. How do you do this? It's so simple; instead of focusing at infinity, focus on the hyperfocal point. This will pull back the complete depth-of-field range to finish at infinity and you will gain half the hyperfocal distance in depth towards your camera.

This is straightforward to do in practice but for the technically minded you can use the following formula:

Hyperfocal Distance = Focal Length 2 divided by (f/no. multiplied by Circle of Confusion).