Posts Tagged ‘Diffraction’

When you take a photo of a landscape, it's not too difficult to get everything from a few feet in front of you all the way to the horizon in focus. But as you get closer to your subject and the magnification level increases, the depth of field (amount of the image in focus) rapidly drops off.

In macro and close-up photography, depth of field is so narrow it is usually measured in millimeters. So taking photos where more than just a thin sliver of the image is in focus can be tricky.

The depth of field in this image covers just a small part of the butterfly's mustache

Capturing sharp images is something that virtually every photographer tries to do with every image. Even if only a very slim portion of the image is in focus, we want that part to be sharp, and record as much detail as possible.

Emily by schani on flickr (licensed CC-BY-SA)

The only exception I can think of is some portrait photography, where a soft focus filter may be used to give a soft and dreamy look.

To get tack sharp photos, there are a number of things you can do: