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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stoshowicz" data-source="post: 363132" data-attributes="member: 31397">Yep guys , thats really somewhat reasonable , I do shoot the dragonflies all the time though , I have hundreds of shots , some of which are on flickr.. my personal experiences aside , Im suggesting that its not this impossibly huge number of results covering a large number of circumstances,Mr. Jsees point there is valid , if I hadnt already defined what my depth of field needed to be exactly.. three inches. Mr. Horoscope fish, well I dont want to number crunch out in the field either, I agree  ,, thats my point ,, but ,, neither do I want to be guessing. Mr Wayne F , my experience ' last time out '  doesnt tell me whether I have already reached the limits of what the camera should be able to do. Id like to convert yall to an idea here ,, which you may have encountered on your own,, I dunno ,,"what exactly is the best this thing can do?".I read one day far back , that the larger the aperture , the sharper the image in the focus plane. So for maybe a year , I was shooting with the camera wide open. Not surprisingly I got a good deal of color fringing against the sky ,etc, so I reduced my aperture and found out that at the smaller end I began to lose clarity there was a tradeoff to be made.Then one day I read that the lens wasnt as sharp zoomed all the way out, so I zoomed back a bit and found out I still was losing resolution but now it was because the image was smaller. Somewhere inbetween there is a tradeoff.Then I read this particular lens was sharpest at aperture f11 and ,on another chart, when zoomed back to 135mm , But taking pix , It seemed that I was actually seeing the best resolution in the cropped end result zoomed all the way back out to 300mm at F22 for something about eight feet away. Then I tried focus on something as close as I could get and got my best closest resolution at f11 and 200mm.  Ughh! Thats far too much math for me , I dont have the patience , and Im not going to sit around punching numbers into a DOF calculator as my dragonflies take off for parts unknown.But its clear to me , that since there are trade offs being made - there is an intersection point  optimum for each parameter (aperture , angle of view )And there may in fact be a single sloped line describing the optimum of the combined parameters for a given lens. It may be that only the manufacturers have enough data to draw it up.. but if known , you could compare the choices you made , to the best choices you could have made.  Without this combined parameter , you just do not know whether you are getting the best out of the lens.  YOU ARE GUESSING . Yes you may be roundabouts that very best quality by virtue of your experience , but you also may be trending to use too much aperture , or too little -too close or too far, too much zoom , too little zoom. Or perhaps this lens isnt the one you should be using.   Professionally you could be wasting time taking shots that were close , but not good enough. You calculate exposure , or at least you have the camera do calculation, and youd be willing to calculate Dof for its own sake .. why shouldnt you be able to calculate or set a shoot up, for greatest sharpness??  (when thats what you need)</blockquote>

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