User guide

Quick Tips

3. Improving Optical Performance

Stopping down the aperture increases depth of  eld, mak-

ing both the foreground and background sharper. Stop the

aperture down too far, however, and di raction will actually

cause the image to be less de ned. The e ects of di raction

are partly in uenced by the size of the pixels on the camera’s

image sensor, but with the high resolution o ered by the

D800/D800E, the e ects generally become noticeable at

around f/11. When greater depth of  eld is needed, don’t im-

mediately apply the minimum aperture; instead, determine

the aperture setting that o ers the best balance between

sharpness and depth of  eld. The sample images on this page

show how de nition in the metal grating is lost when an ap-

erture smaller than f/11 is used.