Hi Tanya:
You will no doubt have received many other replies to this one, but my two
cents worth is this:
There is no hard and fast rule for _any_ given photographic situation.
Don't forget that, with many landscapes, everything is so far away that
aperture setting is not crucial to depth of field, but may be crucial to
sharpness: some lens suffer badly from diffraction effects at apertures smaller
than f11.
If you have all the time in the world to take the shot, and you want depth of
field, you must choose a lens which will normally give you that (e.g. a
wide-angle), and then choose a viewpoint to give you the perspective you want.
Use a tripod, and set the aperture so that the area you want is sharp - if you
want everything sharp, then use a small aperture and the hyperfocal distance
method to work out where you need to focus.
If you don't have all the time in the world, or there are other factors, such
as the impossibility of choosing the best viewpoint, then you must work with
what you've got. If this includes a tripod, then you basically can set any
aperture that will allow the selection of a suitable shutter speed for the
subject, and take it from there. There are always limiting factors - for very
long exposures, as one of our group found out recently, reciprocity failure can
be a serious problem. if you are shooting beach scenes, or any scene with
running/moving water, do you want the water blurred or sharp?
I've taken landscapes at all sorts of distances/apertures - one of my most
'wow' generating shots was taken at 1/8 sec at f1.8, resting on the top of the
car, in fading light. But the nearest object was more than 500 metres away, so
it's all "sharp".
HTH
On Sunday, April 15, 2001 3:46 PM, Tanya & Russell Mayer
[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
<SNIP>
> she claimed that she had this friend who was
> an "expert" on landscape photography, which I basically know ZILCH about.
> She claimed that his number one tip was to shoot EVERYTHING in landscape
> photography at f22 to ensure maximum depth of field. Ok, so here is my
> question, (and please forgive me if I am wwaaaaay off track here), but when
> you are shooting, say a lake, or a beach scene at 6.30 at night and you need
> more light, doesn't it make sense to shoot as wide open as possible? <SNIP>
John Coyle
Brisbane, Australia
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