Aperture help!
 

Dear all,

I need some help on this.

The other day I went to the mountain. I was on top of it overlooking a terrace rice field in the valley below. I shot a photo and set the aperture to very small, it was probably around f/29. And the photo came out like this:

Terrace rice field

(Sigma 70-300, photo shot at 300 mm)

My question it: If this was your case, what would you set the aperture to be?

Great thanks to any answer of yours! Cheers, mate!

Hi there Nightflower - I like it and I do not think I would alter it at all, it has plenty of detail and the only thing I might consider is lowering the brightness a little. Good shot.

Like the shot but do not see any advantage in setting an aperture of f29. At that setting you must be into the area of losing detail due to diffraction and you do not need maximum depth of field at that distance so to answer your question I would set f11 which would give good depth of field, a faster shutter speed to reduce the risk of camera shake and be in the sweetest spot for definition for the lens and with minimum optical aberrations. Like Andy I would lower the brightness a little.

I agree with Mike, you do not need f29, f11 would be fine as he says.

I'll have to agree........... at f29 your going to run into diffraction problems. I'd increase the aperture to f8-f11 and reduce the brightness with exposure compensation (further reducing it in PP if needed or adding a neutral density filter at the shoot).

I'm totally new to this but I read somewhere that the sweet spot for this type of shot between f8-f11. Is this right?

Hi Dave, the "Sweet Spot" refers the aperture at which a lens works best. The aperture at which it produces the sharpest image. It may come as a surprise to you but lenses are not consistently sharp across all apertures. This is due to the physical make up of them and the physics involved in their manufacture. The sweet spot may vary from lens to lens purely because of the manufacturing involved. This is one reason why top glass is valued not only for its optical properties but also the consistent quality control of the manufacturer. With many lenses f8-f11 is the aperture at which one expects the lens to perform best, hence that is it's sweet spot, but not all lenses will conform to this. With a 50 mm f1.4 Nikkor many say the sweet spot is around f5.6 - f8. With a 70-300 mm zoom it may have different sweet spots depending upon the combination of focal length ie: it may have a different sweet spot at 70 mm than at 300 mm.

Thanks Andy. I have a hell of a lot to learn, looks like I found the right place though.