Focus Issue With EOS 60d

Hi! Yes I do, I have EOS Utility and for the attached examples I used the left and right arrows to focus my image.




as you can see I cant have the background and the foregound of the coin in focus at the same time.

Hi @Avalanche, and welcome to the forum!

The problem you are having is due to your aperture setting. F2.8 is way too wide and you should try stopping-down to at least f8, possibly f11 in order to get sufficient depth of field for you ancient coins.

Now, if you do want to focus stack, it will give you a slightly better result, but is a lot of work to do if you can get away with stopping-down the lens with acceptable results, so try that first.

-The problem you are having is due to your aperture setting. F2.8 is way too wide and you should try stopping-down to at least f8, possibly f11 in order to get sufficient depth of field for you ancient coins.

Dear rmpsrpms,

Thank you for your reply, I'm pulling my hair out since I can't get this to work.

I have done as you said and I will include some examples.
I am not yet satisfied with the results, I have tried different apertures, since I am a newbie I am open to all suggestions. I am trying different settings.

The distance from my camera should be sufficient, I have tried putting it further away but unfortunately, same results.

These are the pictures I just made with adjusted apertures both with focussed back- and foreground:

Hi John!

I'm really happy people are trying to help, I was about to call in a professional hahaha.

i changed the ISO as you mentioned and I did seem to get a little better result.

Any ideas how I could improve on this?

It seems that if I change the ISO to a higher number the end result suffers in sharpness.

here is an example:

The ISO will not affect your depth of field. I would keep the ISO 400 or less to insure adequate resolution.

Since you're using a fixed focal length 100mm lens, there are only 2 things you can do (besides focus stacking) to improve your depth of field. One is narrowing the aperture as @rmpsrmps suggested, and the other is to increase the distance from the lens to the coin. I would try an aperture setting of f/16, and move your lens further from the coin, even if you have to crop the final image a bit. If you still can't get everything in focus with your high relief coins, you may have to try focus stacking, which will be a lot more effort.

Is the camera hand held or placed on a stand? If hand held, it takes a lot of practice/patience to get the focus right.

Hey thanks for all the replies, I really do appreciate it.

I will give some additional information:

I'm using a tripod and I am using the computer to look at the coins before I make the picture, so in live view.

I use the buttons to get the best focus manually, when I use auto focus the result is blurry or cant find the coin.
With these arrows:



The camera WAS 37cm (14.5 inch) above the coin and NOW I changed it to 48.5cm (19 inch), I also changed the ISO back to 100 and f/16 like suggested.

The result is as follows:



Seems better, maybe the extra distance was needed?

rmpsrpms mentioned "Focusing on a middle feature" how do I do that?

Also I try and keep vibration to a minimum, I gently press the spacebar to take the shot and keep my arms off my desk during this whole time.

I would suggest replacing the current coin with a low relief one, like a common circulating coin, to rule out technical problems like vibration and inaccurate focusing. I have little faith in tripods.