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When shooting landscapes, having a good understanding of depth of field can be very handy. Even though there's no such thing as an infinite focus depth, cameras can help us get closer to it. One way to do that is by using a tilt-shift lens and tilting the lens forward to throw the focal plane sideways.

If you're using Fuji film cameras, there's actually a way to see the depth of field scale in camera. First, make sure you're in manual focus mode. Then, go into the menu and look for the autofocus manual focus option on page two, near the bottom. There should be an option to display the depth of field scale. This setting is usually based on film format, which is more loose than pixel basis.

For example, if I set this to film format, it will give me a better estimation of what I'm going for with the lens when using manual focus. So, let's go into the viewfinder and see how it works. Since I'm in manual focus mode, I have a focus scale at the bottom of the screen.

Now, if I set my focus point to 10 feet, look closely at the lens. You'll see two blue lines that go on either side of our focus point. This is telling me what's in focus. When I stop down the aperture, notice how the line changes shape and moves around a little bit.

Notice that when I move my focus down, the line starts to shrink and gets thrown around a lot more. So, if I want everything from 10 feet to infinity, f/16 will certainly do it. But if I'm shooting closer, like 2 or 3 feet, the field of focus is much narrower.

As a nerd, I wish all camera manufacturers had this smooth implementation of a focus scale, especially when using manual focus mode. Fujifilm did a great job with this feature, and I wish all lenses had technical markings on them to help us visualize how depth of field works.

But that's not the case, and we need to learn in our head how depth of field works at different distances and scales. It's much shallower the closer you are to a lens, and much wider when you're further away. When is it a good idea to stop down to f/11 or f/16? These are things to start thinking about.

Ultimately, understanding how lenses behave will get you better results out of your equipment without needing to buy a more expensive lens. It's all about having a theoretical understanding and using visualization tools like the find edges filter to see how lenses work in practice.

I'd love to hear from you guys - drop me a comment below! I'll catch you in the next video until then, later!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everybody to another installment of lens daze lens days is a series that I'm doing where we talk about optics we talk about lenses and the whole idea is that the better that you understand the tools that you have the better results in your own image making that you're going to get and so we've talked a lot about sharpness we've talked a little bit about bouquet and last video I started to talk a little bit about field curvature and that's what I want to dig into a little deeper in this video on a basic level most of us understand concepts like depth of field and focus and then how do we really visualize that and how do we understand that lens characteristics might deviate from what we expect a lens to actually do Photography is a two-dimensional medium that has a three-dimensional implication in other words we have physical width and height of an image whether that's printed or whether that's on a screen but we don't actually physically have depth that is created visually and so how do we create that well there's different compositional techniques that are obviously going to create that this includes things like lighting and perspective but one thing that's very unique to photography that we don't have necessarily in other mediums is depth of field we have blurriness in our image and this is the way that lenses render there is no way to get 100% everything in the picture in focus with just a standard camera lens unless you start making modifications it's actually one of the things I really love about photography because of the physical characteristics of how a lens works we are almost always forced to make decisions about how we're going to capture an image where the focus point is going to be and how that is impacted in the overall composition so on a very basic level we learn at the very beginning when we pick up a camera how aperture affects what we call depth of field depth of field is the part of the focal plane in your composition where things are in focus now the wider an aperture you use the less will be in focus the smaller aperture that you use more will become into focus most people understand that is a concept what most people don't understand is that in some lenses this is not actually a flat field it can have some curvature to it so how could we visualize if a lens does indeed have field curvature and if so what does that look like I have a very unorthodox technique that I want to share with you guys but first I want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor for this video which are the awesome folks over at wine country camera wine country camera produces the best filter holder system available in fact it is the only fill holder's system with a workflow for combining a circular polarizer in d filters and graduated filters and making adjustments without ever disturbing critical focus there Blackstone filters use vapor deposition coding techniques and fire-polished a shot ultra white glass that are designed for high resolution detail without the color shift that you find in many neutral density filters this system uses step-up rings to attach to any lens and for wider angle lenses with no filter threading they have a 150 millimeter system with custom design that lens attachments this is the system for serious landscape artists right now you can use the link in the description to save 20% off of anything in the entire store by using offer code AOP on checkout once again that offer code is AOP and I want to give a special shout-out and thank you to wine country camera for sponsoring another episode of the arts of photography so I have a technique that I want to show you we're actually going to use a Photoshop filter to do this but this is going to give us an idea of where depth of field is and how we can kind of visualize this so if I go over to Lightroom here this is an image of my cat Judy some of you guys probably know her from previous shows what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this image up in Photoshop so if I right-click I'm gonna say edit in we're going to bring it into Photoshop and this technique that I'm going to show you I actually saw on Lynn's rentals blog and if you guys are interested in learning more I will put a link in the show description on that this is not a scientific test but it allows you to at least visualize in your own images in do testing with your own lens that does not require high-end equipment or fancy software to do but anyway this was shot with a 24 millimeter lens at F 2.8 and you can see the cats faces in focus the rest of the picture is not so what we're going to do is apply a filter so we are going to go under the filter menu at the top I'm going to go down to stylize and in the stylize category we are going to select the find edges filter this is a filter that has no control it just does one thing and it goes across the image and it looks for edges with significant transition to them and it makes those dark smoother transitions between colors and shapes and contrast and to go more towards white but what it does is it shows you on a scale here of darker being sharper and obviously whiter being the softer parts of the image what is in focus now with an image like this you can tell what's in focus without having to do this but I want to show you what it's doing so we talked to in the last video about MTF charts andhow contrast is measured with line pairs and that's kind of how sharpness is defined in any image when you have detail and you have transitions that are significant so edge to edge if there's definition there you have sharpness if it's not sharp you won't have nearly as much definition it tends to bleed into shapes and colors tend to bleed into one another so I use this on an image just to show you that yes indeed the very front part of my cat is in focus the rest of the image is not now if we take the same concept and apply it to an image like this one we can start to visualize where the depth of field will actually be in our composition now in this image we have a street which is made of concrete and so it has texture having something with texture is very important you could also use a grassy field mulch anything like that what I would do is I'm going to right click and I'm going to say edit in Adobe Photoshop let's open this up and once again we are going to apply the same filter stylize find edges and you can see that now because the street is textured and it's more or less in a 3d space here or a 3d representation we can see where that depth of field is and you can also see that yes indeed there is field curvature especially on the sides it tends to curve back it kind of comes up and then goes back towards the center and then back away again so this is not the end of the world and it does not mean that this is a bad lens as I mentioned in the last video just means that you have field curvature and this is actually fairly common to have on something like a 24 to 70 millimeter lens is what this was shot with and it means that you need to be aware of it if you're trying to use a very shallow depth of field and you're shooting a group of people for instance you're really trying to blur out that background it could mean that one of the faces starts to drift in and out of focus and you could have some issues there also if you shoot architecture like the front of a building or something and you need that aperture wide open this could be a challenge being aware of it tells you that you probably need to stop the lens down and you need to start being aware of what settings might get the best image let's apply this to another image this image was done with a completely different lens this was done with a 35 millimeter F 1.8 and let's go ahead and open this up let's go ahead and shortcut the filter application there and you can see that this lens does not have a lot of curvature this is actually pretty much straight it's never going to be completely straight but it is very much more so than something that like this that exhibits a larger of field curvature so this would be a lens that you could shoot a group of people with wide open as long as they're in a straight line you could probably do architecture with this you could do the front of a building if you want to do the famous brick wall test that everybody loves to review lenses with this is one that will probably yield better results but you can see that it's still a little bit curved and I can understand how my specific lens not by theoretical measurement or something from the factory actually works and so this is a really good indicator of that another thing that's important to note is our point of focus is fairly close to the camera in this image actually in both images the further you move back away from the camera the further you push that focus point back your depth of field will increase because it's just done at scale that's how it works so this is an F 1.8 lens this is an F 2.8 lens and so obviously you're going to increase your chances of things being in focus by stopping down but I think it's also worth noting that this type of wave pattern here that we're seeing with field curvature will actually intensify when I move it back in terms of like this point being in focus and the same point just like right here being out of focus so this can be a problem at different focal distances and this is another thing that you can test but anyway that is worth noting so this does bring me to the second part that I want to talk about how do you know what's in focus and how wide this depth of field is at any given setting this can actually be a challenge unless you have a camera or a lens that supports some kind of depth of field scale most of them don't most lenses look like this one modern lens design and the aesthetic involved is just kind of a black tube with minimal markings on it but one of my favorite lenses to use an example I've used it in all three videos so far these ice looks yeah 35 millimeter f/2 these ice loxias all have this little depth of field scale on the side of the lens so this is how you read this on the focus collar when I turn this you're gonna see that it has markings in numbers and it tells you over on the right-hand side that the top row of numbers is feet the bottom row is meters this is showing you the distance of your focal point from your lens and so for instance if I select this clear over at infinity you're gonna see that under that we have kind of this mirrored scale and there's a point in the middle and then it says 4 8 16 20 to basically because it's mirrored it's showing you that everything on either side of that middle line will be InFocus according to your f-stop so for instance if I brought this over to let's two feet and I changed this from two to let's change the aperture down to four I'm going to see that I can see with the corresponding force that I didn't get much depth of field increase off that really at all at f/4 were not even at two and a half feet over on the outer side there but if I start stopping it down to say f/8 or f/11 maybe f-16 I can see that now I have everything from two feet to 2.5 feet now I said this scales so if we pull this out and I'm going to go more towards infinity in fact since we're at f-16 if I put infinity on the 16 that's on the right there you're going to see that we have everything if you look on the left between almost five feet four and a half feet to infinity that's a much bigger depth of field than it was when we were focused in at two feet and so you can use this to actually this is very handy if you're shooting landscapes and you can kind of guesstimate at least where your focus point needs to be to get everything in focus now as I mentioned earlier there is no such thing as a completely infinite focus of depth of field and a camera the only way you can do that is to use a tilt shift lens and actually tilt the lens forward to throw the focal plane sideways so you can actually start to get more in there if you use Fuji film cameras there is actually a way to see the depth of field scale in camera so the first thing you want to do is make sure you are in manual focus mode the second thing you want to do is turn on the camera go into the menu and there are two options for this if I go into autofocus manual focus the second section down and I'm going to scroll down to page two and I'm going to near the bottom here you're gonna see depth of field scale by default this is set up at pixel I'm going to set this to film format basis film format is going to be a lot more loose than pixel and I think also a lot more practical pixel basis is going to be very strict and what it defines is actually in focus versus starting to fall out of the focus plane and so I think in terms of what you would be using manual focus for either studio work or maybe let's say landscape or architecture work when you're in manual focus I think this is going to give you a better estimation of what you're actually going for with the lens like I said it's a lot more loose so having said that lets go into the viewfinder here and you can see because I'm in manual focus that I have a focus scale at the bottom of the screen here and so I'm going to set my focus point to let's say 10 feet now this lens is wide open at f1 point for when I start to stop down the aperture look closely what happens you can see two blue lines that go on either side of our focus point this is telling me what is in focus so when I go down to f-16 I can see that this is all going to be in focus anything pretty much in that blue line so if I want everything from ten feet to infinity f-16 will certainly do it now notice that when I move my focus down that line is going to shrink and get thrown around a little bit so when I'm end down at two feet or three feet I have a much smaller field of focus so this is how we can kind of visualize how that depth of field or the field of focus is actually behaving how wide is it versus how shallow is it so me being a nerd I wish that all camera manufacturers had this smooth and implementation of a focus scale especially when you're in manual focus mode it really helps to see things fujifilm did a tremendously good job with that and I wish that all lenses had technical markings on them I know that's not very popular in today's world everything is a very minimal dark aesthetic with very little markings but the Zeiss did a great job with the lope see is putting the technical markings on there and if you're using them for landscape or in a situation where you do need a better understanding this and a very specific need to know what is in focus this can really help but that's not the way it works and to be honest most people don't need that much information all the time this would be for very specific situations though that I think you do need to learn in your head how depth of field works at a distance and at scale and understanding that's much shallower the closer you are to a lens it's much wider the further you go away from the lens when is a good time to be able to stop down to f11 or f-16 is that a good idea we've talked in previous videos about the fact that you start to introduce diffraction at smaller apertures and so the sharpest you setting for your lens might be F 5.6 and so can you make that work within the picture and these are things to start thinking about I think when you are able to do that in your mind theoretically and then also using a visualization like what we've done with some of these images running them through the find edges filter this gives you a much better understanding of how a lens behaves what it does when it's sharp when it's not and this is ultimately going to get you better results out of the equipment that you already have it doesn't mean you need to go buy a more expensive lens it's just an understanding of what it is that you have I'd love to hear from you guys drop me a comment below I'll catch you in the next video until then laterwelcome back everybody to another installment of lens daze lens days is a series that I'm doing where we talk about optics we talk about lenses and the whole idea is that the better that you understand the tools that you have the better results in your own image making that you're going to get and so we've talked a lot about sharpness we've talked a little bit about bouquet and last video I started to talk a little bit about field curvature and that's what I want to dig into a little deeper in this video on a basic level most of us understand concepts like depth of field and focus and then how do we really visualize that and how do we understand that lens characteristics might deviate from what we expect a lens to actually do Photography is a two-dimensional medium that has a three-dimensional implication in other words we have physical width and height of an image whether that's printed or whether that's on a screen but we don't actually physically have depth that is created visually and so how do we create that well there's different compositional techniques that are obviously going to create that this includes things like lighting and perspective but one thing that's very unique to photography that we don't have necessarily in other mediums is depth of field we have blurriness in our image and this is the way that lenses render there is no way to get 100% everything in the picture in focus with just a standard camera lens unless you start making modifications it's actually one of the things I really love about photography because of the physical characteristics of how a lens works we are almost always forced to make decisions about how we're going to capture an image where the focus point is going to be and how that is impacted in the overall composition so on a very basic level we learn at the very beginning when we pick up a camera how aperture affects what we call depth of field depth of field is the part of the focal plane in your composition where things are in focus now the wider an aperture you use the less will be in focus the smaller aperture that you use more will become into focus most people understand that is a concept what most people don't understand is that in some lenses this is not actually a flat field it can have some curvature to it so how could we visualize if a lens does indeed have field curvature and if so what does that look like I have a very unorthodox technique that I want to share with you guys but first I want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor for this video which are the awesome folks over at wine country camera wine country camera produces the best filter holder system available in fact it is the only fill holder's system with a workflow for combining a circular polarizer in d filters and graduated filters and making adjustments without ever disturbing critical focus there Blackstone filters use vapor deposition coding techniques and fire-polished a shot ultra white glass that are designed for high resolution detail without the color shift that you find in many neutral density filters this system uses step-up rings to attach to any lens and for wider angle lenses with no filter threading they have a 150 millimeter system with custom design that lens attachments this is the system for serious landscape artists right now you can use the link in the description to save 20% off of anything in the entire store by using offer code AOP on checkout once again that offer code is AOP and I want to give a special shout-out and thank you to wine country camera for sponsoring another episode of the arts of photography so I have a technique that I want to show you we're actually going to use a Photoshop filter to do this but this is going to give us an idea of where depth of field is and how we can kind of visualize this so if I go over to Lightroom here this is an image of my cat Judy some of you guys probably know her from previous shows what I'm going to do is I'm going to open this image up in Photoshop so if I right-click I'm gonna say edit in we're going to bring it into Photoshop and this technique that I'm going to show you I actually saw on Lynn's rentals blog and if you guys are interested in learning more I will put a link in the show description on that this is not a scientific test but it allows you to at least visualize in your own images in do testing with your own lens that does not require high-end equipment or fancy software to do but anyway this was shot with a 24 millimeter lens at F 2.8 and you can see the cats faces in focus the rest of the picture is not so what we're going to do is apply a filter so we are going to go under the filter menu at the top I'm going to go down to stylize and in the stylize category we are going to select the find edges filter this is a filter that has no control it just does one thing and it goes across the image and it looks for edges with significant transition to them and it makes those dark smoother transitions between colors and shapes and contrast and to go more towards white but what it does is it shows you on a scale here of darker being sharper and obviously whiter being the softer parts of the image what is in focus now with an image like this you can tell what's in focus without having to do this but I want to show you what it's doing so we talked to in the last video about MTF charts andhow contrast is measured with line pairs and that's kind of how sharpness is defined in any image when you have detail and you have transitions that are significant so edge to edge if there's definition there you have sharpness if it's not sharp you won't have nearly as much definition it tends to bleed into shapes and colors tend to bleed into one another so I use this on an image just to show you that yes indeed the very front part of my cat is in focus the rest of the image is not now if we take the same concept and apply it to an image like this one we can start to visualize where the depth of field will actually be in our composition now in this image we have a street which is made of concrete and so it has texture having something with texture is very important you could also use a grassy field mulch anything like that what I would do is I'm going to right click and I'm going to say edit in Adobe Photoshop let's open this up and once again we are going to apply the same filter stylize find edges and you can see that now because the street is textured and it's more or less in a 3d space here or a 3d representation we can see where that depth of field is and you can also see that yes indeed there is field curvature especially on the sides it tends to curve back it kind of comes up and then goes back towards the center and then back away again so this is not the end of the world and it does not mean that this is a bad lens as I mentioned in the last video just means that you have field curvature and this is actually fairly common to have on something like a 24 to 70 millimeter lens is what this was shot with and it means that you need to be aware of it if you're trying to use a very shallow depth of field and you're shooting a group of people for instance you're really trying to blur out that background it could mean that one of the faces starts to drift in and out of focus and you could have some issues there also if you shoot architecture like the front of a building or something and you need that aperture wide open this could be a challenge being aware of it tells you that you probably need to stop the lens down and you need to start being aware of what settings might get the best image let's apply this to another image this image was done with a completely different lens this was done with a 35 millimeter F 1.8 and let's go ahead and open this up let's go ahead and shortcut the filter application there and you can see that this lens does not have a lot of curvature this is actually pretty much straight it's never going to be completely straight but it is very much more so than something that like this that exhibits a larger of field curvature so this would be a lens that you could shoot a group of people with wide open as long as they're in a straight line you could probably do architecture with this you could do the front of a building if you want to do the famous brick wall test that everybody loves to review lenses with this is one that will probably yield better results but you can see that it's still a little bit curved and I can understand how my specific lens not by theoretical measurement or something from the factory actually works and so this is a really good indicator of that another thing that's important to note is our point of focus is fairly close to the camera in this image actually in both images the further you move back away from the camera the further you push that focus point back your depth of field will increase because it's just done at scale that's how it works so this is an F 1.8 lens this is an F 2.8 lens and so obviously you're going to increase your chances of things being in focus by stopping down but I think it's also worth noting that this type of wave pattern here that we're seeing with field curvature will actually intensify when I move it back in terms of like this point being in focus and the same point just like right here being out of focus so this can be a problem at different focal distances and this is another thing that you can test but anyway that is worth noting so this does bring me to the second part that I want to talk about how do you know what's in focus and how wide this depth of field is at any given setting this can actually be a challenge unless you have a camera or a lens that supports some kind of depth of field scale most of them don't most lenses look like this one modern lens design and the aesthetic involved is just kind of a black tube with minimal markings on it but one of my favorite lenses to use an example I've used it in all three videos so far these ice looks yeah 35 millimeter f/2 these ice loxias all have this little depth of field scale on the side of the lens so this is how you read this on the focus collar when I turn this you're gonna see that it has markings in numbers and it tells you over on the right-hand side that the top row of numbers is feet the bottom row is meters this is showing you the distance of your focal point from your lens and so for instance if I select this clear over at infinity you're gonna see that under that we have kind of this mirrored scale and there's a point in the middle and then it says 4 8 16 20 to basically because it's mirrored it's showing you that everything on either side of that middle line will be InFocus according to your f-stop so for instance if I brought this over to let's two feet and I changed this from two to let's change the aperture down to four I'm going to see that I can see with the corresponding force that I didn't get much depth of field increase off that really at all at f/4 were not even at two and a half feet over on the outer side there but if I start stopping it down to say f/8 or f/11 maybe f-16 I can see that now I have everything from two feet to 2.5 feet now I said this scales so if we pull this out and I'm going to go more towards infinity in fact since we're at f-16 if I put infinity on the 16 that's on the right there you're going to see that we have everything if you look on the left between almost five feet four and a half feet to infinity that's a much bigger depth of field than it was when we were focused in at two feet and so you can use this to actually this is very handy if you're shooting landscapes and you can kind of guesstimate at least where your focus point needs to be to get everything in focus now as I mentioned earlier there is no such thing as a completely infinite focus of depth of field and a camera the only way you can do that is to use a tilt shift lens and actually tilt the lens forward to throw the focal plane sideways so you can actually start to get more in there if you use Fuji film cameras there is actually a way to see the depth of field scale in camera so the first thing you want to do is make sure you are in manual focus mode the second thing you want to do is turn on the camera go into the menu and there are two options for this if I go into autofocus manual focus the second section down and I'm going to scroll down to page two and I'm going to near the bottom here you're gonna see depth of field scale by default this is set up at pixel I'm going to set this to film format basis film format is going to be a lot more loose than pixel and I think also a lot more practical pixel basis is going to be very strict and what it defines is actually in focus versus starting to fall out of the focus plane and so I think in terms of what you would be using manual focus for either studio work or maybe let's say landscape or architecture work when you're in manual focus I think this is going to give you a better estimation of what you're actually going for with the lens like I said it's a lot more loose so having said that lets go into the viewfinder here and you can see because I'm in manual focus that I have a focus scale at the bottom of the screen here and so I'm going to set my focus point to let's say 10 feet now this lens is wide open at f1 point for when I start to stop down the aperture look closely what happens you can see two blue lines that go on either side of our focus point this is telling me what is in focus so when I go down to f-16 I can see that this is all going to be in focus anything pretty much in that blue line so if I want everything from ten feet to infinity f-16 will certainly do it now notice that when I move my focus down that line is going to shrink and get thrown around a little bit so when I'm end down at two feet or three feet I have a much smaller field of focus so this is how we can kind of visualize how that depth of field or the field of focus is actually behaving how wide is it versus how shallow is it so me being a nerd I wish that all camera manufacturers had this smooth and implementation of a focus scale especially when you're in manual focus mode it really helps to see things fujifilm did a tremendously good job with that and I wish that all lenses had technical markings on them I know that's not very popular in today's world everything is a very minimal dark aesthetic with very little markings but the Zeiss did a great job with the lope see is putting the technical markings on there and if you're using them for landscape or in a situation where you do need a better understanding this and a very specific need to know what is in focus this can really help but that's not the way it works and to be honest most people don't need that much information all the time this would be for very specific situations though that I think you do need to learn in your head how depth of field works at a distance and at scale and understanding that's much shallower the closer you are to a lens it's much wider the further you go away from the lens when is a good time to be able to stop down to f11 or f-16 is that a good idea we've talked in previous videos about the fact that you start to introduce diffraction at smaller apertures and so the sharpest you setting for your lens might be F 5.6 and so can you make that work within the picture and these are things to start thinking about I think when you are able to do that in your mind theoretically and then also using a visualization like what we've done with some of these images running them through the find edges filter this gives you a much better understanding of how a lens behaves what it does when it's sharp when it's not and this is ultimately going to get you better results out of the equipment that you already have it doesn't mean you need to go buy a more expensive lens it's just an understanding of what it is that you have I'd love to hear from you guys drop me a comment below I'll catch you in the next video until then later\n"