Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]OK, I know the answer to this question could be: 'go and do some test shots', and also that the question may be slightly on the theoretical side, but anyway, here we go: Imagine for a second that you want to make a picture of three people standing on the other side of the street. The street is 4 meters wide. One of the people, let us call him 'the father' stands directly opposite you on the curb, four meters away from you because you also stand on the curb. Also on the curb on the other side of the street from you, but three meters to the left of the father is his son, and similarly, three meters to his right is his daughter. Obviously the children are five meters away from you. In this situation most people using an M will focus on the father because he is so conveniently located right there where the little yellow window is, that we use for focusing. Others will focus on the father because they have heard something about flat film plane and they take that to mean that everything at a 'picture plane' paralell to the film plane will be at the maximum sharpness if the distance set equals the the minimum distance from the film plan to the picture plane (i.e. measuring at 90° from camera to picture plane). Now imagine you want to take a picture of just the children, but with the children remaining in their original position. In this situation, most people would focus on one of the children (and thus set the distance to 5 meters) and then reframe the picture to include both of them. With the flat film theory as I understand it, the children would not appear as sharp on the negative as they would had you not refocused, i.e. they would have appeared sharper on the negative had you not changed the distance setting from 4 to 5 meters. Please tell me what is right and wrong in the above. Please do not tell me that it does not matter because it will be covered by depth of field, because I know that is not true, at least not for large lens openings. Rgds - -- Christer Almqvist D 20255 Hamburg and / or F 50590 Regnéville sur Mer please look at my NEW b+w pictures at: http://www.almqvist.net/chris/dozen/ old pictures still at: http://www.almqvist.net/chris/new - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html