By the river

[xeliex]

This photo was taken with the following:

Canon 1.6 crop camera (rebel xti)
12mm lens
f/16
ISO 100.



To the right you can see a bird that just jumped into the frame

Before exploring this website, I would've definitely set the aperture to f/22 and shot! Now, I have to think a bit and try to use hyperfocal distance chart or application on my phone.
Now I know that at f/16 the camera is well beyond its diffraction limit.

I would like to hear people's opinions. What to do in such scenarios when you want the depth of field but are aware of diffraction?

Thanks.

[McQ]

That's quite a lot of depth of field! I would even consider just using f/11 since you are taking this photo at a focal length of 12 mm on a 1.6X cropped camera....which has tons of DoF. I am presuming that this was taken using Canon's 10-22 mm wide angle lens? Or was this the sigma 12-24? Regardless, at f/16 corner sharpness will increase a tad with either of these lenses, but center sharpness will suffer somewhat from diffraction.

Another thing to consider is that with the exception of the rail on the right, the vast majority of the subject matter is pretty far away. Sometimes I feel that it's worth relaxing the sharpness criterion a tad if it only applies to a small portion of the subject matter.

Something else to note is that for very small apertures, dust on your lens or camera sensor becomes more apparent. In this example I can see at last a couple dust spots in the sky. No worries though, these can be easily removed using Photoshop's healing brush or clone tools. At some later point you might consider cleaning the camera's sensor, but that's a whole other topic unto itself. Try and do this as infrequently as possible...the amount of dust you have right now is IMO ok.

[xeliex]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this McQ!

[xeliex]

The lens by the way was the Tokina 12-24mm.