More focus on multiple subjects

[radical]

I just bought my first DSLR camera ( Nikon D3100) and have 70-300mm zoom lense that I use for all of my wildlife picitures. My problem is that when I take pictures with more than one animal in the frame there all not in focus.
What do I need to do to fix this??? Its driving me crazey!

[bob_r]

Welcome to the forum!

There are a number of things that control your depth of field (DOF), the aperture setting, distance to the subject and focal length. Even when you close your aperture as much as possible, you may still have a very shallow DOF because of the focal length of the lens and the distance to the subject. Here is a link to an online DOF calculator that lets you change the variables and will calculate the DOF accordingly.

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

There is another problem that can result from closing your aperture too much and that's called diffraction. Here's a link that explains it better than I could.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutori ... graphy.htm

Hope this helps.