This post was last modified: 2013-11-18, 21:20 by gmueses.

Hi everyone.

I've just finished reading Gunther's ebook and I've already done 4 holy grail tests with LR & LRTimelapse with promising results
All were done at f8 or narrower.

On the book, Gunther recomends always shooting wide open to avoid flicker. My questions are:
How wide is wide? I can go as wide as f1.4 on my Canon L 24mm.
But, if I go that wide, wouldn't I be compromising my depth of field on a landscape shoot?
If I was just taking a single picture of a landscape I'd usually set my aperture as narrow as possible to get everything in focus (eg: foreground, middle ground, background and sky). But this advice of shooting as wide as possible goes against my knowledge of photo theory. Where should I focus? How do I avoid getting planes out of focus on my image if I go too wide?

Please advice.

Regards,

G.

You can only avoid flicker if you shoot with aperture full open. If you don't want that, on canon you can use the twisted lens trick (set the aperture, press depth of field button, hold an unlock the lens, twist a little bit).
If you shoot wide open, you would not use a f/1.4 lens normally, most landscape TL are done with ultra wide angles.

Thanks Gunther.

Apart from the lens twist trick (which I get), my question has more to do with the depth of field. I tried a timelapse @ f/2 the other day, I focused on infinity but (obviously) all the foreground came out of focus.

My widest lens is a Canon 16-35 f/2.8 and my other candidate is a Canon 24mm f/1.4. As you see, I can get a pretty wide f on both lenses, but I'm sure if I choose an f too wide I won't get focus all the way from front to back.

So when you say wide, what are you suggesting? 3.5, 4.0, 5.6? Or 2.0 2.8?

Thanks in advance.

G.

Shooting without aperture flicker only works if the aperture doesn't close at all. So either you shoot with the widest aperture (1.4 or 2.8 depending on the lens) or you use the twist trick.
See this video:
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVnqd4f3Kmk]