Originally Posted by
Corran
But what about the midrange distance and/or bottoms of the trees, in that instance? In fact, what I generally do is as you describe, and then find the relatively "best" focus area to get most of the scene in focus stopped down a little (as much as I can before the image is so faint as to be basically un-seeable), understanding that more DOF will be apparent at the back of the focus area. When stopping down a minimal amount, I have seen issues at the base of the trees in an image like this, in smaller formats.
Anyway, if you had said that perhaps f/64 would be "enough," that would be one thing - I agree that maybe f/90 is slight overkill, as a safety factor to get everything inside the DOF, but f/32 for a shot like this to me is entirely too small, if the intent is to have it all inside the focus area. Now if I were oriented to a flat plane and wanted background objects to be a little bit out of focus to separate them from the foreground, that would be understandable, but in this case I would personally never consider shooting wider than f/64. And all of this "risk" to make sure the sheet of film retains more detail despite contact printing, is anathema.
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