F/2.5 for Night Landscape photography? How to bring distant subjects in focus?

Http://www.popphoto.com/gallery/sample-image-gallery-nikon-d800?image=2

According to the EXIF of the picture in the link (click the web link above) the aperture is f/2.5. How the photographer was able to get distant objects (buildings etc.) into perfect focus at f/2.5, were DOF would be very very shallow.

For 2 reasons, His subject is basically a flat plane and He is at a distance to the subject.

The distance you are from the subject and aperture determine the depth of field.

See this article I wrote for our Club

http://www.westfield-photo.org/depth%20of%20field%202.html

I haven't looked at the pic, but if all objects are very distant then depth of field is not needed. You don't specify the focal length of the lens, but the wider the lens the greater the d of f, so it was probably a fairly short lens.

Because they are distant objects. Depth of field is related to distance as well as aperture. Even at wide apertures, hyperfocal focussing (look it up) will bring everything from about 100 yards to infinity into sharp focus. Depends on the focal length, but for a wide angle lens typically used for landscapes, that's about right. In the bad old days when focussing was manual and lenses therefore had depth of field markings for all the available apertures, this was immediately obvious.

Http://www.popphoto.com/gallery/sample-image-gallery-nikon-d800?image=2

Simple. The photographer knows all about Depth of Field (DOF) and used that knowledge to make the picture. There are only three factors that affect your DOF:

1) The focal length of the lens.
2) The aperture used.
3) The subject distance.

In the referenced picture the subjects - the buildings - are all more or less equidistant from the plane of the sensor. The photographer also knew that there's more DOF behind a subject than in front so he took advantage of that knowledge as well.

Use the DOF Calculator at this site to prove this for yourself:
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

Nikon D800, 85mm lens @ f2.5, focused on a subject at 100'-0'' DOF is from 75.9' to 146.6'. Anything from 24.1' in front of the subject (75.9' in front of the camera) to anything 46.6' behind the subject (146.6' in front of the camera) will be in acceptable focus.

Here is a picture I made using a 100mm lens @ f11 and ISO 200:
Exposure of 30 seconds.

Same scene with a 200mm lens @ f11, ISO 200:
Exposure of 30 seconds.

You need a better grounding in Depth of Field (DoF) theory, you obviously have no idea how it works.

DoF is controlled by apperture but also by the distance from subject.

The further you are from the subject the deeper the plane of focus.

Shooting at f2.8, on a Canon 5D at 50mm with a subject at 600 feet would basically focus on infinity.

Shooting at f2.8, on a Canon 5D at 50mm with a subject at 5 feet would create a plane of focus about 0.38 ft deep

So, as you can see, the closer you are to your subject, the shallower your Depth of Field.

The plane of focus starts where you focused and extends, roughly half its depth forward and backwards from the point (more or less).

Here, read this page:
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html