I don't know how you shoot night landscapes/ cityscapes but I never go below f/8. You will surely need a tripod and a remote for long exposure.
Landscape lens
- Thread starter Belo
- Start date
I don't know how you shoot night landscapes/ cityscapes but I never go below f/8. You will surely need a tripod and a remote for long exposure.
WhiteLight
Senior Member
3 choices i would have:
nikon 14-24 f/2.8
tokina 11-16 f/2.8
sigma 10-20 f/4
3 great wide angle lenses, in order of quality & preference
nikon 14-24 f/2.8
tokina 11-16 f/2.8
sigma 10-20 f/4
3 great wide angle lenses, in order of quality & preference
friedmud
Senior Member
For landscape photos I always shoot between f/8 and f/13, so I don't really understand why the reason for big apartures
This is a bad idea on a D600. On a D600 you will start to notice diffraction effects beyond f/7 or so. As you go toward f/11 the whole scene will begin getting softer. Anything beyond f/11 will show a noticeable drop in sharpness. On a D800 the effect will start earlier (f/5.6 or so) and will really degrade your sharpness by f/11.
If you don't believe me, go get a really sharp lens (I've personally done testing with my D600 and my 50mm f/1.8G)... set it up on a tripod, manually focus a landscape scene with plenty of detail, use mirror lockup (or at least a 3 second shutter delay) and shoot a sequence of shots going from f/2.8 to f/13. Things will most likely get sharper to about f/5.6 then level off until about f/8 and then the image will start getting softer. It's physics... and can't be avoided.
The old adage of "I shoot landscapes so I just shoot between f/8 and f/16!" is no longer a good idea. As sensors get more and more advanced and are packing in more MP us landscape shooters are going to have to get better about using larger apertures and using hyperfocal style focusing... OR switching to tilt/shift lenses.
I personally believe that tilt/shift lenses are going to be our saving grace here. By tilting the focal plane you can shoot at f/3.5 or f/4 and still get everything in focus from the rock in front of your camera to that mountain peak that's miles away.
However, good focusing technique (like hyperfocal techniques) can allow us to use larger apertures with our "old school" perpendicular focal plane lenses. If you've never heard of hyperfocal focusing before this is a decent explanation:
Hyperfocal Distance
On that site they also have a really good DoF calculator that tells you what the hyperfocal distance is for a given situation. Personally, I have an iPhone app that does DoF and hyperfocal calculations that I use in the field. If it tells me my hyperfocal distance is 15 feet... I generally estimate an object that is about 15 feet away and focus on that (usually manually using zoomed in Live View... but using contrast detect AF in Live View mode using a small focus box works well too). After a while though... you just start to learn where they hyperfocal point is for your most used scenarios and it just becomes second nature.
Just to give you an example.... if you are at 24mm and using f/5.6 (which is where my 24-70 f/2.8G is sharpest) the hyperfocal distance is ~11 feet. If I focus there then everything from 5.6 feet to infinity will be in focus. That is pretty dang good. No need to go to f/8 or to f/11 to get that foreground interest and those mountains in focus... and no reason to go anywhere near diffraction effects....
friedmud
Senior Member
Yep, there are still reasons to go beyond f/8... but they have to do with shutter speed instead of sharpness. I also use f/16 to f/22 when I need just a bit slower shutter to smooth out motion (like waterfalls). I do use ND filters to help as well... but sometimes small apertures are the only way to get to the shutter times I want.
However, there is a new (to me) technique to get "smoothed out" motion without resorting to small apertures: multiple exposures. I never had this capability with my Canon cameras (although some high end Canon bodies can do it now) but it is on my D600. It lets you combine multiple shutter releases into one single image. So if you get your shutter speed to 1/3 of a second and you combine 3 exposures (which is the most the D600 can do) you get an effective 1 second exposure... all without resorting to f/22...
I've tried it on a few things around here... but nothing worth posting yet. I hope to use it on some waterfalls soon....
Well, I shoot DX so I can't argue about f/5,6 being the sweetspot for sharpness but I never go beyond f/13, although most of the times I shoot landscape at f/11, using the hyperfocal.
I know some of the softness of my pics are due to the Sigma 10-20 but you have a way to correct part of that in PP. I stopped using smaller apertures to decrease shutter speed because of diffraction because I noticed that pics at f/18 lost a lot when compared to others at f/11.
The best investment for landscape photography is a Lee filter set.
I know some of the softness of my pics are due to the Sigma 10-20 but you have a way to correct part of that in PP. I stopped using smaller apertures to decrease shutter speed because of diffraction because I noticed that pics at f/18 lost a lot when compared to others at f/11.
The best investment for landscape photography is a Lee filter set.
Most lenses drop off in sharpness after f8 (see MTF charts), so you have lens diffraction to deal with along with sensor diffraction. I'm usually shooting waterfalls at about f8-f11. HDR will help create the smooth effect with lower f values. I try to shoot waterfalls on overcast days which helps slow down the shutter also (in addition to limiting blown out highlights). Another nice tool is a CP or ND filter to slow down the shutter so you can shoot falls at f8 or lower.