Fast forward to a great little DIY fix for this situation. Can’t read a label? In the hotel shower and you can’t read the labels to know which is the shampoo and which is the conditioner since they look exactly alike?
Here’s the trick: Make yourself a small aperture to view through, even without your glasses. Make one of those “A-OK” signs with your hand, a loose fist, with your finger closed inside of your thumb. Then make the hole smaller and smaller and smaller, until there is barely an opening to see through….then look through that as you read a label, newsprint, or the like. Put your eye right up against the tiny little opening and you won’t believe how sharp things will appear to you.
We know that the hyperfocal distance will help us achieve the maximum depth of field possible with any given lens. So, for the widest angle of view and the smallest aperture, we want to focus on the hyperfocal distance. But how do we do that? This week I present you with a very low-tech for yet effective solution.
There are no markings on your lens nor settings in your camera to indicate the hyperfocal distance. This is something best determined before you head out to shoot. Older film camera lenses often had a window on the lens that gave a general indication of depth of field, but remember, digital cameras don’t have a consistent sensor size and the depth of field calculation changes depending upon the size of the sensor.
Photographers have a handicap. Think about it. We live on, and photograph, this wonderful spinning blue ball called Earth. Our subjects are dynamic three-dimensional objects - some real close to our cameras and others far away. Yet the end result of our endeavors is usually a flat two-dimensional piece of artwork. We loose that third dimension we called depth.
