where should I focus?

[JPB]

When I take a field of just flowers, I never know where to focus:
foreground?
lower third?
upper third?
focus on distance?

[CB Photo]

i woul dhave focusd in the foreground...the color purple is the subject so crisp focus up close will allow your eyes to drift off and think purple...

[Peter_AUS]

When taking vistas you need to set the hyperfocal distance of your lens to maximum, or up around f/22 that way you get the greatest depth of field for the lens. Test by putting something in close proximity to you in focus and change the f-stops in a series of photos and you will see the diffence changing the f-stops do.

[barmy101]

In addition to CB Photo's good suggestion, I would say that any of those areas you listed are ok depending on what you are trying to accomplish. A common practice that landscape photographers do is to use the hyperfocal distance. Without getting into the science of it, basically you stop you lens down to say f16 or f22 and focus to infinity and then back off a bit. This will give you a range in meters that will be in sharp focus.

[Seb]

Hello JPB,

While I cannot recall having ever shot something similar to your picture I would definately say that in a situation like this (where your subject is an uniform pattern and that there is no key point to focus on), I would be naturally drawn to focus on the foreground.

Using a very small aperture to get everything sharp as Peter suggested surely is an interesting thing to do. However, I guess that my first reflex would have been to use an arperture arround f/6 or f/8 to get a progressive blur in the background. I guess that there is no right answer here. Your best bet is to try different apertures and see what you prefer. Either way, I would simply suggest not to use a large aperture as you did in your example as it lead to a shallow deep of field where a certain row of flower is sharp while the rest is significantly blurried (which I don't think is appropriate considering your subject).

I'd like to see the result of your experimentation. You have an interesting subject that you framed well. I am confident that you will get great results with few trials.

regards

Seb