Hyperfocusing

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Focusing a Field of Tulips

At summer you see a field of tulips, you take out your Minox GTE or 35ML, compose a vertical shot. Looking through your viewfinder,you see there are so many flowers, from near to far, the nearest flowers are at the bottom end of of viewfinder, the furthest ones are at top of your viewfinder. Now you have two distances, a near distance X and a far distance Y; you also know that you should focus at Z = 2*X*Y*(X+Y).

But do you know where the point Z is in your viewfinder ?

It can be mathematically proven, that the center of the viewfinder points exactly to point Z.

A few years ago I posted an article in rec.photo news group:" Hyperfocusing the Tulips" about this interesting relationship in the viewfiner. The next question is how to choose the aperture ? Of course, you can do it the hard way, that is estimate the near distance and far distance, then use the depth of field scale on your camera to find the proper aperture.

But there is a simpler "rule of thumb", which I shall write about next

-- Anonymous, February 14, 2000


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