In landscape photography you often want to have both near objects (like foliage or people) and distant objects (such as a bridge) in focus at the same time. To achieve the widest depth of field you have to focus at the hyperfocal distance.
But it’s not trivial to figure out what that distance is. It depends three inputs: the current aperture, focal length (zoom) and sensor size. You can either look it up using a table or an iPhone app and hope that your lens has distance readings. Or if you have substantially better eyes than mine you can locate it using depth-of-field preview button on your SLR camera.
But why should you have to? The camera knows all three of the input values. They’re present in the EXIF data of dSLRs. Why shouldn’t you be able to issue a command to the camera to just focus on the hyperfocal distance right now?
Or, you could enter a mode where it continually adjusts to that hyperfocal distance as you vary the aperture and focal length.
It could even provide a schematic diagram on the LCD showing the nearest distance that things are in focus and hyperfocal distance, so you can learn the relationship between the inputs and results. (This would be valuable for all kinds of other shots, not just huge depth of field shots.)
It seems like such camera features would make sharp landscape shots a lot easier to attain, and would help make the abstract math of hyperfocal distance intuitive for photographers.
