Simple Tip for Getting Tack Sharp, In Focus Landscape Photos Every Time

For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.

But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes “as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien.”

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Cripps tip is extremely simple. First, you dial in your aperture — he suggests starting at f/8 where many lenses are at their sharpest — and focus about a third of the way up the frame. Then, flip the lens into manual focus and switch into live view.

From there, you simply zoom in on both your foreground and your background in live view to make sure everything is in focus. If it’s not, adjust as needed on your lens until it is.

Note: Some cameras will automatically stop the lens down to your selected aperture setting when you switch into live view, while others will require that you hold down the depth of field preview button.

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If you find that you can’t keep both in focus, you can either stop down the lens further, or try one of the four tips Cripps offers in the video. Either step back to essentially move your fore and background closer together, shoot with a wider lens, embrace the catch 22 and use a shallow DOF to enhance one part of the scene, or focus stack.

To see Cripps demonstrate all of this for you — along with a good dose of humor for the start of your Hump day — check out the video above and then go visit his website for more useful tutorials or if you’d like to browse through some of his beautiful landscape shots.

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