LEARN HOW HYPERFOCAL DISTANCE WORKS
You may wish to copy the following and paste it into a word processor to print it out so it is handy when you carry out the exercise.
Set your camera's aperture to ƒ/8. Look through the viewfinder at a bright highlight on a subject, say a tiny point of reflection from something shiny, and turn your lens' focusing ring so the highlight is way out of focus. The highlight will appear as an enlarged disk of light.
Now begin to bring it into focus, and you will notice it progressively reduces in size until it reaches the position of exact focus, when the highlight has changed from a disk to a point. If you keep on turning the focusing ring of your camera past the position of exact focus, the highlight soon expands again into an out-of-focus disk of light.
You are seeing that the highlight starts as a point when in focus and increases in size as a disk on either side of the point of sharp focus.
Good. Now bring it back into focus again, then turn your focusing ring only slightly one way or the other, so that the point of light becomes a tiny disk, but the image is still fairly sharp, although actually out of focus.
Now activate your depth of field preview button or switch, and you will notice how the tiny disk has become an in-focus point of light again. So, even though your picture is not in apparent sharp focus as you view it through the lens, it comes into focus because the aperture closes down and brings it into acceptable focus.
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