The hyperfocal distance of a camera and a lens describes a "sweet spot" in terms of the focal plane. At your hyperfocal length, the focal plane is at its widest and its most globally potent, giving you much more room to cram in several larger-than-life subjects, such as mountains, big vehicles or buildings, and even things like star trails photography.

A term like "hyperfocal distance" will usually be enough to have any science-phobe running for the hills, but we urge you to hear us through. This is one professional photography technique that every photographer needs to know.

What Is Hyperfocal Distance in Photography?

You've got two extremes on any camera barrel: your close focusing distance and focus set to infinity. Dialing yourself anywhere in between shifts the plane of focus forward or back, either closer to the camera or further away toward the horizon.

Contrary to popular belief, you'll find your hyperfocal distance at neither of these two positions. It's not synonymous with focusing at infinity. Instead, it's one optimal and reliable way of ensuring that highly distant objects are rendered sharply mathematically, without necessarily finding perfect focus by hand.

The textbook definition of hyperfocal distance:

How to find hyperfocal distance.

Here, you can see that the hyperfocal point is a point in the scene at a given distance from the first face of the camera lens.

If you were to place a marker halfway between this point and where the camera stands, you would be delineating the beginning of the plane of photography. This "wedge" extends out toward infinity; it's wide enough to comfortably envelop even very distant subjects or groups of subjects completely.

What Makes Hyperfocal Distance Unique?

The hyperfocal distance of a camera lens maximizes your depth of field, giving you the widest possible slice of the pie to throw over your subject as a whole. Shooting with the smallest aperture that your camera is capable of, alone, won't necessarily confer this same guarantee. Why not, you ask?

Well, when you shoot at your hyperfocal distance, you ensure that none of the wedge gets lost behind infinity. Some camera lenses will actually show you your falloff zone in terms of focus. These marks indicate how wide your focal plane is in the field at different aperture settings, making cradling infinity much easier and more convenient on the fly.

Related: What Is Depth of Field and How Does It Occur?

It's worth noting that your hyperfocal distance doesn't change with your aperture. Instead, it's more beneficial to regard this relationship as complementary. The width and the depth of the focal plane will change proportionally as the diameter of the aperture increases or decreases, but the "heart" of the focal plane, the center-most point between falloff in both directions, stays fixedly in place in front of you.

These are all minimal distinctions to make, but they all make a big difference if you're serious about using hyperfocal distance to your advantage. Let's talk a little bit about how to achieve hyperfocal distance practically.

How to Find Hyperfocal Distance Using Your Camera's Lens

Hyperfocal distance has little to do with your camera—it's all about the lens, its focal length, construction, and speed, among other things. All lenses in your collection will boast their own unique hyperfocal settings. You can find each one by eye or use one of the following alternative approaches.

If you use a DSLR or mirrorless camera lens and it's got etchings that show you how your aperture and focus distance are lining up, you're in luck. It's straightforward to find the hyperfocal distance using lenses with this helpful feature. How?

Let's say that we're shooting at an f/22 in this case. Usually, the big notch in the middle would be what we use to find our focus when shooting a photo. Instead of using this marking, let's check out the series of notches surrounding it. The ones closest to the middle represent hyperfocus as a wider aperture. As you move out toward either extreme, the aperture becomes narrower as the width of the focal plane increases.

The hyperfocal markings on a camera lens.

To find our hyperfocal distance using this lens, we would need to turn the barrel until this second, right-most f/22 indicator ends up being directly below the infinity symbol.

Once we're there, the rest of the configuration follows suit, falling into rank. The hyperfocal distance itself ends up being a little less than three meters—the left-most f/22 indicator shows that objects as close as around one and a half meters away from the camera will also be in focus, alongside the majority of the focal area behind it.

How to Find Hyperfocal Distance With Math

You can also sit down with a pencil and paper and find your hyperfocal distance with the following official formula. Let's try to decipher this mess.

The formula for hyperfocal distance.

Here, H refers to the hyperfocal distance itself. N corresponds to the diameter of your aperture; f is your focal length, and c is the threshold for acceptable focus that you've decided upon and defined. It's determined in terms of something called the circle of confusion.

This method can be less than practical for many photographers—laying out the maximum possible circle of confusion that you're willing to consider to be "in focus" can be kind of a hassle in the field.

Related: What Is the Difference Between an F-Stop and a T-Stop?

When to Use Hyperfocal Distance in Photography

Hyperfocal photography across the board focuses on one thing, in a general sense: photographing huge, distant subjects, or many mid-field subjects that should all be equally sharp.

A huge limitation with hyperfocus is that none of these faces or subjects can be too close to the camera. If you know what you're shooting and what you would like to accomplish, the choice you need to make will be more than obvious.

A few types of photography where your hyperfocal distance will serve you well include:

  • Large-scale industrial or architectural photography
  • Landscape photography
  • Astrophotography, including star trails photography
  • Sports photography, especially when capturing an entire field of running players
  • Commercial photography, including product photography
  • Photography, where there are many faces or subjects in-frame—large group photos, including nature photos (think: a massive field of flowers, or an enormous school of fish, all moving very quickly throughout the scene), are one common application.

Is it possible to avoid using your hyperfocal distance entirely? You can always stack a few versions of the same shot, each one focusing on a different plane of distance in the composition. Using only very narrow aperture settings, anything below an f/16 will help you maintain crystal-clear sharpness throughout the image.

However, neither of these approaches will end up being as fool-proof and as water-tight as doing things the right way. That's why hyperfocal distance is our top recommendation for professional-looking photos.

Related: What Is Middle Gray in Photography?

Finding Hyperfocal Distance: The Intellectual Quest of a Lifetime

Your camera's hyperfocal distance can be an extraordinarily useful failsafe for your most challenging projects. It's easy to find and imparts the image with a taste of that big-budget, Hollywood epic type of feeling.

You already know our advice: give 'em a real run for their money. Hyperfocal distance takes the problem of adequate focus out of your hands, leaving you to more important matters, such as getting the shot in the first place.