How to shoot exactly what I see?

How do I make the camera shoot exactly what I see with my eyes?

That is, nothing specific in focus (or everything in focus) - just as I see the scene with my eyes.

What focal length and what camera settings will achieve this?

Do some research of Ansel Adams and the F64 Club. They used Large Format cameras and F64 as the Aperture and they had everything in focus.

I think the point to remember here is that no lens, no matter how good can come close to comparing with the ability of the human eye.

With that in mind, if you want more of the image in focus, set your aperture to as small as possible (larger f/number). This will lengthen your depth of field and bring more of the background into focus.

Truth is, it's impossible. That said, you have a couple options.

One, get to know how your camera works and train your eyes to look at what's in front of you as if they are the camera, and when you see something worth shooting, pull the trigger.

Two, your eyes act like a lens, with your pupils mirroring aperture settings, giving you depth of field that you may or may not realize. The problem is, your brain is so powerful that it exposes everything almost perfectly regardless of how badly lit something is. Your eyes are capable of capturing amazing levels of brightness and darkness in one fell swoop, far beyond what any conventional camera sensor can grab, and definitely more than any monitor or printer can recreate. But, if you shoot a series of photos of your subject in a way that captures the optimal lighting for everything you see and combine them properly, you can come close. In other words, via HDR photography you can approximate what your brain "sees" through your eyes. Just how many exposures need to be combined depends on how diverse the lighting is, and there are plenty of great HDR tutorials out there showing you how to do it with as few as 2 or 3, or as many as 9 (and more!), so dig around and give it a shot.

Didn't realize it was that complex

Isn't it what some very cheap point & shoot disposable cameras do?

I found this little tutorial that I think does a pretty good job of explaining it. Photography Tutorial - Depth of Field, Part 1 - Free Photography Course, DSLR Lessons & Tips

It's a short easy read.

Now, I'm not trying to sound like a smart A** but I think of it the other way around. I bought my DSLR and lenses to get away from the effects of the P&S and to give me control of the background/foreground.
I also keep a P&S in the car for those quick shots.

mobi said:

How do I make the camera shoot exactly what I see with my eyes?

That is, nothing specific in focus (or everything in focus) - just as I see the scene with my eyes.

Click to expand...

You don't see everything in focus, sorry.
Hold a finger up in front of you at arms length, now move away from your monitor so the screen is as far from your finger as your finger is from your eye.
With your finger held up in front of the text, close one eye. Focus on the screen text looking just to the side of your finger, is your finger in focus?
Now focus on your finger, is the screen text in focus?
The bigger the relative distance, the more dramatic the effect.
In bright light you have a small pupil, that increases depth of field, just the same as a cameras smaller aperture.

Also, people think the eye is better than a camera. OK that is true as far as discerning different colours and shades as well as the eye has vastly better dynamic range in a scene.
But the eye has poor vision away from the centre of view, look at a word on the screen and without moving your focal point, try to read text just 4 or 5 inches away.

We think we see everything within our vision in focus, but the reality is, although our eyes are amazing, our brain fills in a lot of the world for us and we believe we see a lot more than we really do.
We can't even see a photo properly, we recognise the shapes in a photo and use our photo memory of the known world that we have learned, to fill in the gaps.
Our eyes dart across the image to better fill in those gaps that we pre-guessed.
That's one of the reasons it's important to "lead the eye" in photography and to keep distracting clutter to a minimum.

laughs,, yes,, just use a cheap point and shoot camera,, and it will have most everything in focus,, like your eyes. but people like the ability of a camera to isolate the subject exactly what our eyes don't do,,, and the there is the lower dynamic range of film/sensors, that give us more color in the light that our eyes are missing, it is this magic,, that we shoot for, and people like viewing.

Rexer John said:

Hold a finger up in front of you at arms length, now move away from your monitor so the screen is as far from your finger as your finger is from your eye..

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Good description John, but does it matter what finger I use?

Middle finger works best, very humerous if someone walks in on you while you appear to be flicking the finger at Nickonites.

If that happens, just tell them you are changing to Canon.

You can use a small aperture to get better depth of field, like f22.

Try closing one eye and then you will have a better view of what a camera sees. That is how I shoot sometimes, as you see more like a camera with one eye closed.

Also if you have a 12 bit image that's 4096 grey levels. The human eye can only distinguish 64, and a typical monitor shows 256.

"f-number of the human eye varies from about f/8.3 in a very brightly lit place to about f/2.1 in the dark"

The human eye's focal length corresponds to around 43 mm.

A good overview of the human eye vs camera lens here:

Cameras vs. The Human Eye

crycocyon said:

Also if you have a 12 bit image that's 4096 grey levels. The human eye can only distinguish 64, and a typical monitor shows 256.

Click to expand...

64, where do you get that figure?

It's generally accepted to be around 450

mobi said:

Didn't realize it was that complex

Isn't it what some very cheap point & shoot disposable cameras do?

Click to expand...

Something like a 24mm focal length with smallest aperture (highest f value) your lens will do, this should be roughly what you are after.

Rexer John said:

64, where do you get that figure?

It's generally accepted to be around 450

Click to expand...

Well I've seen ranges of 30-70 in the literature, in terms of discerning discrete shades of grey. If one is comparing them against each other (relative grey values) then it would be in the hundreds. But on their own, around 30-70 is more typical.

For example, I work everyday with Hamamatsu digital cameras. On their description of digital imaging, they specify 50.

Hamamatsu Learning Center: Dynamic Range

Here in the Multimedia Handbook they say 30.

The Multimedia Handbook - Tony Cawkell - Google Books

you eye does not work like a camera....your eye cannot pan but focuses on individual items in the view before it not on the whole view .....it like flicks from subject to subject....so forget the idea and get a zoom to photograph the area you want the record. Photogrphy is not vision.

pistnbroke said:

you eye does not work like a camera....your eye cannot pan but focuses on individual items in the view before it not on the whole view .....it like flicks from subject to subject....so forget the idea and get a zoom to photograph the area you want the record. Photogrphy is not vision.

Click to expand...

I respectfully disagree. The eye sees what the brain tells it to see. For most people, they see the whole scene first. There is a study done where a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked through an ongoing basketball game and 70% of the observers never noticed him. Other people with some forms of autism or ADHD do NOT see the whole scene, but instead focus on the details first.

​The mechanics of the eye DOES work like a lens in terms of light sensitivity.

crycocyon said:

Well I've seen ranges of 30-70 in the literature, in terms of discerning discrete shades of grey. If one is comparing them against each other (relative grey values) then it would be in the hundreds. But on their own, around 30-70 is more typical.

Click to expand...

But in a photo or on a screen we don't look at shades of grey in seperate boxes, they make up an image in varying shades.
Put 2 shades directly next to the other with no gap, a line will show if the shades have enough difference for our eye to perceive.

Areas of gradual changes will show banding if the number of levels is lower than our eyes perception.

Also our eyes are easily fooled because our brain tells us what we see.
e.g. watch this video.

Mike150 said:

I think the point to remember here is that no lens, no matter how good can come close to comparing with the ability of the human eye.

With that in mind, if you want more of the image in focus, set your aperture to as small as possible (larger f/number). This will lengthen your depth of field and bring more of the background into focus.

Click to expand...

Well put! Even squinting our eyes has the same effect as shrinking the lens aperture.

mobi said:

Didn't realize it was that complex

Isn't it what some very cheap point & shoot disposable cameras do?

Click to expand...

I recall learning in a science class once that "point and shoot", i.e. "no focus, fixed lens" cameras are never really in perfect focus. They are designed to put everything in relative focus, but they cannot achieve the clarity of a lens that can be focused. I forget the optical science behind it all.

Anyone thinking the video was a fake, print this image.

All diamonds are identical.
​The white sections at the top of the image is the only different part.