Sharp Focus? Help

TheMagicPirate

TheMagicPirate

TheMagicPirate

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For a Uni essay, I've asked how as a lighting and camera person I would shoot a predefined shot. One of the things I have to shoot is
In the very near forground in extreme close up are some ants milling around on a piece of furniture over which the lens is looking. Thier bodies nearly quarter fill the frame. There in an old man in the background.

The ants and the old man must both appear in sharp focus.
Click to expand...

I donrunderstand how I'm supposed to have something in the very foreground and something in the background both in focus?

Can anyone give ma any clues?

Cheers guys
 
And lots of lighting and possibly high ISO otherwise you'll end up with a long exposure shooting at small apertures indoors.
 
and mebbe also focusing beyond the ants so your focal point is somewhere in the middle of the two, and then letting a large DoF take up the slack.
Just focusing on the ants and then stopping down may not always be practical. [You may need to stop down further than you'd like]
 
That's a good point. The area of acceptable sharpness (whoever thought of that name, it's cracking) is two thirds behind the focal point and a third in front.
 
Thanks for all the input guys.

I'm thinking I'm going to have the focal point just behind the ants, that way they will be more infocus. I figure the blur on the old man will be harder to see than on the ants.
 
One other thing that you could do is use a compact digital camera. The small sensors mean that you get a much deeper DOF than at equivalent apertures on a full frame sensor. I wouldn't necessarily recomend this though as image quality will be less than on a DSLR.
 
nomore said:
You could set the lens focus to infinity, then you do not have to worry about what to focus on.
Click to expand...
Uhh, not really.

In this case, when the two are at extremes (one very close, other much further away) you can't just set the focus to infinity because the DOF will most likely not reach all the way to the front subject, even at a very tight aperture. In other words, there's a good chance that even with a very tight aperture, if you focus to infinity, the foreground subject will be out of focus.

As posted earlier, you most likely need to focus some way in the middle with a tight aperture so that the DOF will cover both subjects from some middle point, rather than expecting it to reach the foreground all the way from the back.
 
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