Sometimes you simply can’t get a sufficiently large depth of field to retain sharpness in a scene, from the closest foreground area to the background. Using a narrow aperture can only get you so far. Depth of field itself is governed by three factors – the focal length of the lens, the aperture and the focus distance. Use a wide-angle lens at a narrow aperture (large f/number) and more than a very short focus distance and you’ll get a large depth of field. For example, use a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera, set the aperture to f/16 and the focus distance to 1.5m, and everything should appear sharp in the resulting image from a distance of about 70cm to infinity, as measured from the camera’s image sensor, which equates to the focal plane. That should work for most landscape and architectural shooting scenarios.
