Diacritiques

My friend Michel Valdrighi has been browsing photography web sites. And, as he pointed out to me the other day, he’s found quite a few people who who set their lens focus (or extend their depth of field) to … eternity:

• Likewise, you will find that a greater depth-of-field (bigger f-stop number) will make everything from here to eternity appear in focus. (link)
• At that f-stop, you focused the camera at 5 to 7 feet away and the DOF extended damn near to eternity ;-) (link)
• To increase DOF against far distance/eternity, turn to left side. (link)
• It makes a nice, clean image from corner to corner and closes down to f/22 for depth of field from inches to eternity. (link)
• A couple of them are built as rigidly as possible, allowing for an equivalent F-Stop of 100, which gives me focus from here to eternity. (link)
• Digicam (secret for now)
  aperture ~5
  shutter 1/100
  iso100
  ~100mm
  focus eternity (link)

A blend of time and space conceptualisation into one? The word infinity doesn’t only relate to space, though, but also to number and quantity.

The search phrase "from here to infinity" yields only 24,400 raw Google hits, compared to 717,000 for "from here to eternity" (the results for Yahoo! are even more unbalanced). But the latter the title of a novel and (multiple-oscar winning) film.