I try to do this when I have set up the shot, and it has stopped me from getting too excited and forgetting to get the right settings, especially when there is some fleeting light that isn’t going to be around for long.

Well, this comes down to a lot of different things from the quality of the sensor, the quality of the glass, the dynamic range of the camera and many other factors. So, there is a lot more to this than just picking one camera that fits all. Different cameras and different sensors work better for certain needs, conditions and skill levels.

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Low f numberchart

Another thing to take into consideration is the size of the sensor. The bigger the sensor, the shallower the depth of field is for a given aperture at a fixed distance.

Low f numbercanon

If you need to get everything in focus, you must get the camera on a tripod so you can close your aperture down, letting you lengthen your shutter speed and lower your ISO.

So if you are shooting with a camera that has a 1” sensor, you could get everything in focus from front to back with an aperture of f4 whereas with a medium format camera, you might have to shoot at f16.

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Low f numberexample

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You won’t always get it right and sometimes you will look back at your photographs and wonder what you were thinking … in fact, I sometimes still do this, and I have been a photographer since 1996 … and this is what makes photography so frustrating and infuriating but when you get it right, it really does make it all worthwhile, after all, if it was easy, it would get really boring really quickly!

The other day I was out on-location taking photographs of a big landscape, and the foreground was starting to get a bit blurry … this got me thinking about the best apertures to use for landscape photography to get the most out of my camera.

F numberin alphabet

Depth of field refers to how much is in focus from front to back. Generally, with a smaller aperture (higher F-number), the depth of field will be larger than with a bigger aperture (smaller f-number).

Aperture is the size of the hole you set your camera to to let light in. It is displayed as an f number and the smaller the f number the bigger the hole.

Lowf-number lens

If you have things really close to the lens, like 10-20cm away and also things on the horizon, and they are all important … you may have to focus stack, which is a whole new subject that I cover in this video.

If this isn’t an option, you need to rethink your photograph. Is there a way to use that shallow depth of field to add to the photograph?

Let’s say you are at ISO 1000, the shutter speed is at 1/50 second with a 50mm lens on the Sony A7iii, shooting handheld, and to get a good exposure you must open the aperture up to f4.

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f-number calculator

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This photograph was shot at f16 and everything from the grass in the foreground to the horizon is in focus. This wouldn’t have been the case if I had used a wider aperture like f5.6.

Now if you want to have a read about getting better exposures in your landscape photographs, click here, I go into detail about getting better photographs when you are out hiking with your camera!

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On a tripod you could then legitimately shoot at f16, ISO 250 with a shutter speed of 1 second and get the same exposure but much more in focus … and if I didn’t have a tripod, in this case I would try to balance the camera on my bag, or on a wall, somewhere to stabilise the camera and use those better settings to get a good photograph.

If everything is far away and all at the same distance from you, you can use the sweet spot of the lens at around f8 if there is enough light for this setting.

Let’s say you want to photograph some grand trees and show how big they are compared to a couple of walkers in the environment. Then the trees and the people are important, and you don’t have to worry about having a bit of blur in the foreground, in fact in this example below, I’d say it is preferable to blur out the foreground, so you control where the viewer will look … and to do this, you use a really wide aperture (Which is a low f number). Click here if you are unsure how the aperture f number rating works.

Give a camera phone to a beginner and sometimes they will get a good photograph, but give the same person a gfx100 and they would probably struggle, whereas if a pro had the Fujifilm camera, they would be able to manipulate the settings and the composition to get a great photo or at least the beginnings of a great photo.

f-number formula

The first thing to consider before choosing an aperture is what is important in your photograph. In fact, this is one of the most important things you should ask yourself whenever you are out taking landscape photos.

Low f numberphotography

This is great for beginners as aperture isn’t so important to get everything in focus. But just know that the bigger sensors do give better quality as there is physically more sensor to capture the small details in the frame … however they need a higher level of understanding of photography to get the best out of them.

If everything in the image is important, then you need to use a smaller aperture, and something like f11 to f16 is a great aperture for this … most of the time! Read on and you will start to understand what I mean.

As you raise your f number, making the aperture smaller, the image becomes sharper, and most lenses are sharpest around f8. However, this doesn’t mean you should just shoot everything at f8. You need to take into consideration the depth of field.

This table shows the approximate equivalent depths of field depending on aperture and sensor size with a fixed distance to the subject

However, this is only considering a certain type of landscape scenario. Different apertures can be beneficial in different circumstances, and I cover all those circumstances in this article …

So if you were to take a photograph of a scene with a medium format camera like the Fujifilm GFX100 and then photograph the same scene with the Sony RX100, at the same aperture, distance and relative focal length, the RX100 would have a much deeper depth of field giving you more in focus from front to back …

Every lens has a sweet spot and (almost) every lens has a bit of a weakness. This can vary from lens to lens, but generally, wide open, at the lower f-numbers all but the most expensive lenses will be soft around the edges.

Other times, the whole of your photograph might be really far away, like this mountain in the Dolomites. If this is the case, you can get away with wider apertures as it is all so far away, and all on the same focal plane.

You can’t really raise the ISO as your shot will become noisier, you can’t lower the shutter speed because you will start to blur the shot from the movement of your hands … so what do you do?

This photo was taken at f2.8 on the RX10iii … it isn’t the world’s best photo, but I really like how it came out … and I have this hanging on my wall at home.

As a rule, you want to set your aperture between f11 and f16 to get more of your photograph in focus. Anything bigger than this, f1.4 - f5.6, will start to blur the foreground and anything smaller (f18-f32) will start to soften the whole photograph.