Selective Focus in the Landscape

[Ed Richards]

Messing around with a 400mm tele makes me wonder about selective focus in landscape or other non-people photography. Since we have lens tests that show that modern LF lenses are quite sharp when opened up, I am curious if folks are using this in their composition.

[CXC]

Me, no. I like everything as sharp as possible.

[Ralph Barker]

I will often use a wider-than-usual aperture for selective focus if I'm photographing an object that happens to reside within a landscape, thus converting the landscape to a blurred background. I'm not sure the resulting photograph is still a landscape, however.

[Bruce Watson]

Yes. I certainly do that. In photographs that have an explicit foreground subject that I want to be very sharp. For example, this small tree. The scene is quite deep - the far background rock along the top is way out of focus as it was about 15 meters from the tree. The plane of focus ended up being just behind the tree, so what's really in focus is the tree and the two boulders just behind and below it where the shadow is. The rock that forms the background for the top of the tree is a little out of focus but it doesn't matter since it's so dark.

I've printed this at 130 x 100 cm and it looks great. People actually seem to like it better because some parts of it aren't perfectly sharp.

The only alternative for this scene would have been to stop down to f/64 and pull most of it into focus at reduced sharpness due to difraction. So I made the tree sharper and let the rest of it slide a bit.

Choices, choices, choices...

[j.e.simmons]

Here in the Florida swamps, I'd get nothing but a jumbled mess if I didn't sometimes use selective focus.

juan

[Frank Petronio]

You're allowed. In the right light and composition, you can make the blurry out of focus areas work very nicely. Of course this works great for portraits too.

Some lenses create better out of focus areas than others, thus the interest in "bokeh". Google it.

[Joseph O'Neil]

I do, but not the way you describe it. I just developed some negs last night, and everything is sharp, but the day I was shooting was quite windy, so you have some smaller bushes where the leaves are blurry because I shot at a slow speed, while everything else is nice, sharp, and in focus.

The neat thing about this "trick" - at least to me - is yo can get a lot of depth of field, but you still have "blurry spots" in both the foreground and background. Depending on your shot, it can work out nice.

IMO, worth a try someday.

joe

[Eric Leppanen]

I too often selectively focus on my primary subject matter and allow other parts of the composition to go soft. 8x10 is my weapon of choice these days, so unless I want to stop down to f/64 (or worse) and allow the entire image to turn into soggy oatmeal, I frequently have no choice but to selectively focus. It's actually a quite interesting and challenging process, as you really need to analyze in detail what specifically makes your composition work, so that the proper focus decisions are made. As a result the compositional process (at least in my case) becomes more disciplined.

Examples include letting go a near foreground area at the bottom edge of the frame that most folks will never notice; focusing on foreground dogwood flowers and allowing the Merced River in the background to go soft focus (a lens with excellent bokeh is greatly appreciated here); zooming in on interesting knots or features of gnarled bristlecone pine tree trunks; or placing any variety of subjects into a floating, ethereal context by letting its surroundings become soft or blurred, particularly if they have nice specular highlights that benefit from defocus (perhaps this could be called the "ethereal intimate landscape"?). Almost makes you want to experiment with a soft focus lens now that I think about it...

[tim atherton]

listening to Sugimoto it was interesting in that for most stuff he starts at f64 and takes it from there - doesn't worry about the length of time or whatever - seascapes, movie theatres, dioramas, fossills, artifacts, whatever....

[Kirk Gittings]

Ed, I do not, but I think it can be done as long as it is done consciously and carefully. To often what I see seems like a lack of discipline rather than a thought out aesthetic style or statement.