Usually I desk check to consider the Aperture I'll use considering my expectation of the scene. I use Photopills app on my phone. You may use this web version.
As an example I wanted to that light trails of lighted Disc Golf. I wanted to use my 12mm f/2.0 lens. Since there is no way I could focus on the dark what could I do?
I used Photopills DoF and setup my camera type. f/2.0 then estimated the subject distance to the camera of 50 ft.
https://www.photopills.com/calculators/dof
That didn't work since the near distance was 49.+ ft. So what if the lighted Disc lands say 10ft fromy camera? That gives me 9.9ft to infinity, https://www.photopills.com/calculators/dof.
I then used my flashlight to focus about 10ft from the camera.
The result yes but some of the discs landed out of the Depth of field in front so they are not sharp.
To me it's all about "acceptable" sharpness.
Of course YMMV.
