Diffraction: When Smaller Apertures No Longer Mean Sharper Pictures

by Bob Johnson, Earthbound Light
Conventional wisdom is that one can achieve a sharper image by stopping down to a smaller aperture, but this misses the mark in two fundamental ways. First, the image will always be sharp at the point of focus. What a smaller aperture gives you is an apparent sense of greater sharpness by extending depth of field over a wider range of distances in front of and behind that focus point. Second, a phenomenon known as diffraction can cause you to actually get progressively less sharp images beyond a certain aperture, even at your focus distance. And it is this second point that is the subject of this week's PhotoTip article....

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