Hyperfocal Distance Calculator

This hyperfocal distance calculator will help you find a camera's hyperfocal distance depending on its sensor size, focal length, and aperture area opening. In this calculator, you will learn:

• What hyperfocal distance is;
• How to find the hyperfocal distance of your camera; and
• The hyperfocal distance formula.

Learning about hyperfocal distance could help you improve your landscape photography game. Keep on reading to start learning 📸.

The prefix hyper itself seems to denote some extremity to the mentioned distance. And indeed it does.

Hyperfocal distance is the distance in which we can focus our camera to achieve the greatest or deepest depth of field. The hyperfocal distance depends on our chosen camera settings:

• Sensor size;
• Focal length; and
• Aperture area.

When focusing at the hyperfocal distance, our camera's depth of field will start at the hyperfocal near limit up to infinity. The hyperfocal near limit is the distance halfway towards the hyperfocal distance, as shown in the image below:

In other words, all the objects before the hyperfocal near limit will have a blurred image, and everything is "acceptably sharp" beyond that distance. However, since sharpness is subjective, we can say that the hyperfocal distance also varies depending on how much we consider something to be sharp. Factors affecting our perceived sharpness are visual acuity and the amount of enlargement we'll apply to our captured image when we make a printed copy.

Now that we know what hyperfocal is, how about we next discuss how to use our hyperfocal distance calculator? 🙂

Let's say we want to know the hyperfocal distance of a 35mm full-frame camera with a 50 mm lens and an aperture set at f/22. To use this tool to find the hyperfocal distance:

1. Firstly, we select 35mm full-frame from the sensor size list. If you have another camera with a different sensor size that's not on the list, select Custom sensor size from the options to enter its sensor width and height measurements.

2. Then, we enter 50 mm for the lens focal length.

3. Lastly, we pick f/22 from the aperture f-stop selection. This will display 22.627 for the focal ratio as additional information.

Upon doing these steps, our hyperfocal distance calculator will instantly display the hyperfocal near limit and the hyperfocal distance of our camera to be 1.94 m and 3.89 m, respectively.

Continuing our steps:

4. On the aperture f-stop options, we now select Enter custom focal ratio or hyperfocal distance. This option will clear the focal ratio and the hyperfocal distance values. You'll also see that we can now type values for the hyperfocal near limit and hyperfocal distance.

5. Enter 1.5 m for the hyperfocal near limit to discover our approximate focal ratio which is now 29.38. However, since our camera may not have a very specific focal ratio like that, we go to the next nearest aperture f-stop available to us.

6. Since our next available aperture f-stop is f/32, we select that among the aperture f-stop options to obtain our new hyperfocal near limit and hyperfocal distance with values of 1.38 m and 2.76 m, respectively. That will now cover the object 1.5 m away from us 🙂.

Of course, we don't forget that you may be wondering how to calculate hyperfocal distance yourself. That's why in the next section of this text, we'll discuss precisely that 🙂.

Learning how to calculate the hyperfocal distance is definitely another fun way to help you better understand what hyperfocal distance is. Calculating the hyperfocal distance takes only a few steps. Let's start with the hyperfocal distance formula, as shown below:

where:

• $H$ — Hyperfocal distance;
• $f$ — Focal length of lens used;
• $N$ — Aperture f-number; and
• $C$ — Circle of confusion limit.

Make sure that $f$ and $C$ are in millimeters to get a value for the hyperfocal distance in millimeters, too. In the formula above, we introduce the concept of the circle of confusion. We use the circle of confusion limit to determine the depth of field, and we find its value in millimeters using this equation:

where:

• $d_{\text{av}}$ — Actual viewing distance of a printed photo version of an image;

• $d_{\text{sv}}$ — Standard viewing distance that a person can observe the said printed photo through a defined visual acuity;

• $\text{visual\ acuity}$ — Visual acuity at which an observer can tell the details in a printed photo at the standard viewing distance in terms of line pairs per mm (lp/mm); and

• $\text{enlargement}$ — Enlargement factor used for the sensor dimensions to find the desired print dimensions. An enlargement factor of 5 means we want our printed photo's width to be 5 times the width of our camera's sensor. We also aim to view this printed photo at the actual viewing distance, $d_{\text{av}}$.

Please note that the actual and standard viewing distances must be in the same unit of measurement.

Using the hyperfocal distance is perfect in taking landscape shots, cityscape pictures, and in astrophotography. However, since we're taking very deep depths of field and we're using small aperture sizes, capturing those photos in low-light situations would be difficult without the proper camera settings.

You can check out our shutter speed calculator to help you decide the duration of your shot. We also have our exposure calculator that you can use to check if your camera settings are perfect for any given lighting situation.