Why you need to stop using f8

Thanks Craig, down here down under in the colonies, thanks for the thought provocation, we can get hi key easily with our light from 5.00 in the morning till 7 at night. 😊

Craig, you're a good photographer knowing your experience, and it shows in these videos. Great shots again and made me think over using f8 mostly. Definitely want to try night photography so your tips will not be forgotten. Keep up with your informative work.. 🤙🏽

Great advice, top music selections too!! I've always been fearful of using smaller apertures due to the dreaded lens convergence. But I do need to experiment more to see where exactly convergence becomes a problem in each of my lenses.

Excellent content and great pictures. Your points about depth of field are spot on. However, if you shoot raw , can you not adjust exposure in post leaving you with more options?

Would that be 'f4 and be there' on micro four thirds crop sensors?

Next video is to suggest people try step away from shallow dof bokeh favor

"You you need to stop shooting wide open"

Yes fast aperture and shallow dof can pop up the main thing but it may a bit boring too 😂

Unlimited video idea

Thanks. A good video. But I wish the title would have been: ..ONLY f8. Depth of field or out of focus are ancient concepts. All modern experts use Bokeh.

i am a f11 guy with my wide zoom lens - it calls for it :)

Nice one, Craig. You got the gears in me mind turning.

Interesting view, thanks Craig! just subscribed. I use a Canon 6DM2

Mainly use f8 for infrared on full frame. Diffraction starts to give me problems after f11 for IR shots. Unless I want a sun star, then I no longer care. 😛
For visible light, I used to go crazy with f1.x primes but now I'm more comfortable with the f2.x range. And then there is the fun of using aperture for macro. Now that I'm on Nikon I at least get to enjoy seeing the effective aperture setting being shown to me.

When I switched from crop sensor to full frame I used f11 for most of my landscapes, but nowadays it varies between 6.3 to 11, depending on the subject.

I like your approach on depth of field in night shots. Up until now I did the same as with landscapes during daylight, your absolutely right: what you don’t see doesn’t have to be in focus. That’s the biggest learning point of this video.

There's a lot of good sense here, but the 'technical' approach that you polemicise against is the usual internet exposure cult nonsense. It leaves most people trying to adjust exposure without an idea of what they are trying to achieve, or a rational method of doing it. If exposure is all about image tonality, just use P mode. The primary purpose of the aperture control is setting DOF. For best quality you need to be setting the shallowest DOF that your creative requirements allow. Similarly, shutter speed is the motion blur control.set the most motion blur that your creative constraints allow. The thing is, image quality depends on exposure, and the best quality is with the largest exposure that you can use while satisfying what you want to do creatively.

Excellent Craig…very inspiring to get out there and be creative! 👏👏👏

Lately I’ve been doing intentional camera movement. Sometimes I forget to bring a ND filter. I stop down the aperture and lower the ISO all the way. The images get blown out when I’m at 1/4”. I’m learning to appreciate high key ICM to the extent I’m choosing to do it on purpose on a regular basis.

An interesting thing I have been doing is shooting the same screen but using different settings. I want to see the image change. Since I’m shooting with a digital camera there is no added expense when I experiment with my settings. I have gravitated to 1/8” so I experiment with my aperture settings. When my experiments fail I didn’t fail. I’m learning what works best for me and what I like. I have learned a lot of settings don’t work for me this way.

I love this Mark Twain saying. “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.”

Because of my forgetting the ND filter on a regular basis, f16 is quickly becoming my favorite aperture setting.

Mask On Nurse Marty (Ret)

Interesting and thought-provoking content as ever Craig. I use compact and MFT cameras which often give more DoF than I really want. You've got me thinking I should try FF; film of course!

I am a digital landscape photographer for about 20 years now. I very often include very near foreground into my compositions and also want sharpness to infinity. When i started as a novice most websites always kept telling me never to use smaller apertures than f11 or f13 as past those you would loose a lot of sharpness. While this is true when you have a photo to compare taken at f8-f11 to a photo at f16-or even f22 at 100% + magnification i never ever heard anyone say to me...." seems you used a smaller aperture than f13 now the photo looks soft". What people do say is your foreground or background looks soft...you probably used a to big aperture and you now do not have complete depht of field. Softness due to choosing a larger aperture ( and thus by most websites a better sharpness) in near foreground and background is way more visible than the bit sharpness lost by using a much smaller one. On location taking multiple photo's at f8-f11 and stacking them later for max depht is often hit and miss as in landscapes there's always something moving between those multiple photo's. I often use f22......if i do not mention that to other photographers that review my photo's....they will never know or say a thing about it. If however you say you did make an image at f22 for sure they will start to bring the image down. Why you say....because some websites have mentioned that and thats all they believe.

"f/8 and be there" was for reportage and street photography - to be sure you get the shot in focus, under regular shooting conditions

Just a tip and it may just be me. I don't like want to watch 3 minutes of music/video before you get to the subject. I got bored waiting and moved on.......

Great video as always Craig. A very creative reminder on using the tools we have available. Also loved the moody mono location images at the start. That’s why you are one of my favourite you tube channels, no fancy locations, you rock up to a ‘normal’ location and get some fantastic images where some people may struggle get anything. Keep doing what you are doing, haha and refreshing not to be sponsored by a certain web hosting platform 😊

For whatever reason, my favorite aperture in my Olympus days was f/4, but in my Fuji and Nikon days, it has been 2.8... I have no idea why. But, this video inspires me to go and just try different, and see different. For others, Craig's E6 subscription, IS worth it... to me anyway.

Please don’t use the POV technique. Just show the photos. Has all the charm of a police video.

Beautiful images, do you take them in camera black and white or edit them from colour?

Excellent and instructive video!

The best photo vlogger on You Tube. Craig doesn’t need fancy locations or over the top equipment. No one exemplifies what can be achieved with a camera along with the sheer joy of taking photographs like Craig.

Gosh, all this time I thought that WeeGee said "f/0.8 and be there" -- I've gone through three Voigtlaender 29mm Super-Noktons just trying to get an image.
Not easy riding a motorbike, listening to a police scanner and manually focussing one of those at 0.8 simultaneously, but then, no one said it would be easy.

As you say, it always comes down to use case and the image you're trying to create. And probably most importantly, every lens has it's own unique characteristics, for how soft it is wide open, or where it's sharpest, etc. So you need to understand each inside and out to know how to create the look you're going for.

But for the zooms I use for landscape photography, f/8 is the sharpest aperture before diffraction starts so yeah that's where I usually am lol. For my street prime f/5.6 is my preferred aperture. Portraits from f/1.8-4. Astro at f/2. The situations and choices are endless, and you only figure it out by experimenting!

I don't overexpose or underexpose in camera, if I want those effects, I do it in post processing. I shift off base ISO only if I can't otherwise get a good histogram.

I shoot in M and use image brightness, histograms, zebras stripes etc to judge exposure. I could use aperture priority and exposure compensation, I don't see a compelling reason to do so. I expect I could use shutter priority too.

Nobody finds my photography boring. Including my TAFE lecturers.

I have done single prime, wrongs settings (generally wide open), wrong lens (done a portrait with a fisheye recently)?, go where there's nothing to see to make interesting. 2024 is my year of (mostly) bad photos. I might continue it into 2025.

I do stuff, to see what happens. What happens is a lot of junk, reasonably frequently a decent photo nobody else would make.

My A setting depends on the light , my subject, & if am I trying to be creative or just taking a few random shots (which I'll probably trash later) Upon the purchase of any lens , I watch a YT video or two about my lens & make a note of where my lens aperture provides the best quality. Then I adjust from there as required for that particular moment , subject & desired effect.

The aperture also controls beam flattening. The projected image of a simple lens is spherical, onto a flat sensor or film plane. This means the centre is sharp whilst the corners are defocused. This is usually corrected by lens design, projecting a flatter image, and/or having a bigger image circle than the sensor to alleviate vignetting. Closing the aperture blocks the fuzzy sides of the beam and so sharpens the image all the way across; usually one or two stops from wide open. I usually like a little vignetting and turn any anti-vignetting function off. Having the periphery slightly defocused can emphasise the subject in the middle.

Very enjoyable video!

I think my most used aperture is f5.6. For some reason I really like how the images look like on that. Tend to use that on my 12-100 f4 lens and back in the day 12-40 f2.8. This video was good lesson, Do need to get out of my though I need the image to be as sharp as possible as sharpness isn't always the thing to go for.

Thank you!

You're simply very right. Your message sounds like "wake up and have fun beeing more creative" ! And winter is not only great for hibernation, it helps finding more high and low key subjects. Thanks

What a ripper Craig! Well done.

Good tips. Thanks. one question. I really liked the black and white beach photos at the beginning? What was the small compact that you used and were you shooting at 1x1 or did you crop afterwards?

Which f-stop is the best? "It depends" Which is the same answer I give my clients when they ask "what is the best solution?" C o n t e x t is the driver in both situations. 😉

Recently read a comment that pointed out that Steven Spielberg always uses a deep depth of field, keeping his characters' environment in focus. Look for that next time you watch one of his films.

I was always taught F/0.95 and be there

Nice video

Very good thoughts - and images to go along as proof of concept

Great video thank-you got me thinking

Bull crap!

I love F8 after lots of experimenting because it allows me to tell the whole story

Your intro is WAY too long

f8 is fine if you’re earning a decent living (from Joe Public, not photographers) doing routine social photography, as I did for decades. To paraphrase one of the American speakers, you could say: 'There are apertures for show, and apertures for dough.' That is, there are times to be sure of the end result, and times to experiment. Technically, depth of focus is not the same as depth of field. And in fact, theoretically, there is no such thing as depth of field, it is a misnomer, it should really be called, perhaps, ‘zone of acceptable sharpness’. There is only one, not necessarily flat, plane that can truly be in focus ... at any aperture. I think Jason at Points in Focus agrees with me on that point.

Excellent video. Good food for thought.

Every f/stop is there to be used, even f/8. SO USE IT -