WHERE TO FOCUS

Once you start focusing your attention on storytelling compositions, you may wonder, Where the heck do I focus? In a pastoral scene of a barn in a wheat field, for example, focusing on the foreground stalks of wheat will cause both the barn in the middle ground and the sky in the background to go out of focus. If you focus on the barn and the sky, however, the foreground wheat stalks will be out of focus. The solution? Don’t focus the lens at all. That’s right: don’t focus. Instead, preset the focus via a predetermined distance setting.

Single-focal-length lenses have a depth-of-field scale that makes it very easy to preset your focus for a given scene, but few are the photographers today who use single-focal-length wide-angle lenses. Wide-angle zooms are the norm, but there is a trade-off: no depth-of-field scales! However, they do have distance settings, and knowing how to set the distance is key.

Distance settings are similar to depth-of-field scales in that they allow you to preset the depth of field before you take your shot. And since every storytelling composition relies on the maximum depth of field, first set your aperture to f/22 and then align a specific distance—3 feet (1 meter) or 6 feet (2 meters), depending on what focal length you are using—directly above the distance marker.

So, when shooting storytelling compositions in which you want as much front-to-back sharpness as possible, try my foolproof formula: