In photography, you can set your lens to “infinite focus” which will keep both near (within limits) and far objects in focus.
The one aspect of this: Even when a lens is set to this mode, there is some blur introduced for very distant objects due to particulates in the air which condense on a z-axis and cause objects in the distance to be a bit blurry (compared to nearby objects).
The distant mountain shows less detail than those in the foreground. This is not to say that atmosphere is the only contributor to this but I’m trying to introduce this effect into scenes I’m constructing.
From the first image, I gather Pentax K-1 full frame sensor, ISO100, f/11, 1/20s, focal length 31mm.
If you model the scene to scale and appropriate vantage point, how well does it match? If depth of field doesn’t produce expected results, in this case where you’re not really looking for bokeh, you may be able to use the mist output in comp. Since bokeh isn’t 100% accurate to a real lens for obvious reasons, I don’t know what other “shortcuts” have been taken.
Maybe set up experiments based on hyperfocal calculations. Note that “older” photographs with extreme depth of fields were often shot with big format cameras with insane apertures like f/64 or f/128.
Although the effect I mention is external to the camera, I understand there’s an addon to reproduce camera exposure settings in Blender. I’ve used hyperfocal (in real life) and setting that up in Blender is the easy part!
(after some additional research…) Eeeesh. I’ve created a landscape which is just under 7 miles in diameter (per the MeasureIt addon). After adjusting the clip settings for the camera, positioning it (relative to the landscape) and plugging in the aperture ratio, sensor size,…A DOF setting of 1 meter seems to have done the trick (but I’m not entirely sure this matches up to real world optics).
Here’s a render with settings applied to the camera and a veronoi texture applied to the landscape:
