The "Ah-Ha" Moment?

An unpublished response to this thread at the Strobist Flickr Group:

The pertinent quotes:
I want to shoot say a family pet the lighting in the room is very dim...this is where I get into trouble my instinct tells me I want some depth of field say f11 and surely I will need a speed of at least 180th or 200th to freeze any movement.

Background info is that this is from A Landscape Photographer, capitals mine.

Where many photographers get themselves into trouble is when they learn just enough "facts" that are pertinent to their chosen type of photography but neglect to learn or try any other styles.
This creates myths.

Many times you'll read in a book or on the net that depth of field/depth of focus (hereafter DOF) is very important for landscapes because you get reasonably sharp focus from the nearest object to the clouds on the horizon.
First of all, who says so?
(I won't go into motion-blur @f22).
When I use my eyes to look at something not-too-far-away I fully expect the background to dissolve into a blur.
Such is the nature of lenses.
And I find landscape photos with focus throughout to be unnatural, sterile, boring, and less-sharply-focused in the important places than if the photographer had paid attention to the aperture range where maximum sharpness is found for his lens.
Un-Focused, in that my attention isn't drawn to any specific place by using the tools available to draw my eyes where the photograher wants them to go.
What's important is placing your DOF into a range within the image that works the best at conveying your intent.
You want to focus attention on parts of the image, not provide a clinical everything almost in-focus overview of the scene.
Good photos are less about the blade of grass right in front of you or the hilltop a mile away--those are just incidental to what the photo is supposed to be portraying.

So unlearn the Max-DOF fixation.
It hurts more than it helps.
As an example, just look at almost all of my night photographs.
I have no choice but to open my aperture up--my current favorite is f3.5--to get enough light to overpower sensor noise.
My highway series includes some deep scenes and they don't suffer one bit from a theoretically shallow DOF.
My DOF is fine, because I'm shooting in the real world instead of the theoretical one. A noisy photo with less lens sharpness due to small aperture diffraction wouldn't look nearly as good as the way I do things, and I have the testing and results to back this up.
A main reason for this is that shallow DOF is only a "problem" at long focal lengths or 'zoom' settings. Landscapes are usually done at the wide-angle range of the lens where they already have the most DOF.
It's kind of scary that a photographer has trouble going indoors and makes so many wrong assumptions that experience should have eliminated by now. Add the complexities of flash and we have a recipe for disaster.

The other side of this coin is a few photographers I've known who were taught the opposite "rule" that wide apertures give you blurry backgrounds.
Well...yes and no.
They do if you use lots of zoom, and especially as the distance between the camera and subject decreases and/or subject to background increases.
But this is not the main reason to use a wide-open aperture.
The aperture controls the light!
Concentrate on that.
Forget about the rest of this stuff until you know how to use your aperture to get a well-exposed and sharp exposure with your camera and lens under a wide variety of conditions.


Just forget all these "rules" you might have picked up because they are really only gross generalizations that will trip you up and get in the way of good photography.