Focus everywhere on the picture...

Hi,
There's something that's bothering me and I can't figure how to fix it.
I wanted to take a picture of my brother with a building far in the distance. But there was no way I could have everything in focus. Either my brother was in focus or the background, but never both. I tried with manual focusing, I tried with the smallest aperture available... I just couldn't get it the way I wanted.

I've managed to have landscape where everything was in focus in the past. Does it come from the camera being full frame and the fact that they have a shallower depth of field? What am I doing wrong?

Your problem is Depth of Field.

To get a relatively close subject and a far background in focus at the same time requires a very large DoF, which in turn requires a very small aperture and a very short focal length

Try a test with your T4i and Samyang 14mm. Set your aperture to f/22. Set your shutter speed and/or ISO to the values that give correct exposure. That should give you an idea of what your current equipment can do.

Then play around with aperture, to find your camera's best DoF compromise.

Using a small sensor also helps tremendously. Try shooting the picture with your cell phone. They usually have miniscule sensors and lenses with ridiculously short focal lengths. This makes for super large DoFs.

Oh yeah, it's the real focal length of the lens that matters, not the "35mm equivalent" focal length. Forget any crop factor values.

This explanation of hyperfocal distance might be of interest also:


http://www.dofmaster.c​om/hyperfocal.html

Simply put, your brother was probably too close to the camera to allow for the entire scene to be in focus, even with a small aperture. Take a few steps back with a wide angle lens set at f/16 or smaller and your problem will most likely be solved.

Yeah Hyperfocal distance is what you are looking for. Handy thing to know for your most common fl/av. 14mm at 5.6 for instance is from 6 feet to infinity.