Find the sweet spot on your lens

Dude, you just like… totally found the sweet spot on your lens, brah.

Every lens has an optimum aperture at which it operates, called it’s Sweet Spot, a term likely coined by a surfer photog. At this aperture, images will have greater clarity and sharpness. If you set your aperture too wide, you let in too much light and the sharpness degrades. If it’s too small, you run the risk of diffraction causing your images to become less clear.

Even fast and expensive lenses are subject to this. That nice 85mm f/1.4 you bought won’t be sharpest at f/1.4. In reality, the point of optimal sharpness is about two stops over the widest aperture. In the case of the 85mm f/1.4, it’s sharpest at about f/4.

Each lens will vary slightly, of course. So how do you find the sweet spot on your lens? Test it! Stick your camera in Aperture Priority mode and shoot the same subject at all the various apertures your lens can afford you. Afterwards, when you have those pictures on your computer, view them at 100% and compare them to one another. When you find the one that’s sharpest, check the shooting data on it and BAM, whatever aperture that image was shot at is the “sweet spot” of the lens.

Surf’s up.