Focus

In conjunction with the January Newsletter, here are a few examples of focus failures and successes. Sometimes it is the cameras fault, but not too often. Sometimes we ask too much from autofocus.

“Why is my Eagle blurry?” Cameras have a hard time finding subjects when they are hiding behind branches or other distractions. Finding a clearer shooting line or, using a tweak on the manual focus ring can help. These shots are never easy, but pretty nice when they come in focus.

Motion blur, the out side wing is too fast for the shutter speed. It is not a bad effect, if the head and eyes are in focus. It gives the image a sense of motion.

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” – Ansel Adams

Focusing on the purpose, mood or message will also help to improve the impact of an image.

Same location, same owl. The difference is the angle of the shot. The purpose was to show off the beauty, calmness of the owl as she sat on the farm sprinkler system and surveyed the land around for prey. Getting as little distractions in the background improves the feel of the image. All I had to do was move about 50 to 60 feet to the right to get the yellow control panel out of the shot. I could have gone to the other side, but the light was coming from the right side.

My favourite photography happens at night, which is great except that focussing becomes more difficult. Auto focus does not work, so all night sky shots are manually focussed. The good news for these is that focal point is infinity. The process is to use the brightest star in the sky, magnify the view finder, then making the star as sharp as possible. Then of course, checking the shots for proper focus by magnifying them in the review screen.

A little more advanced issue is keeping subjects that are separated by large distances in focus. In the moon and Lighthouse picture, the distance between the two is around 240,000 miles. In this case, the camera must be focussed at infinity and the distance to the lighthouse needs to be far enough so that it is beyond the infinity distance of the set up. This is called hyperlocal distance, which is the distance beyond which, every thing is in focus. These are some of my favourite compositions.

These tips are somewhat technical. The objective was to describe some situations and challenge you to think about the scene before taking the shot. Even the simplest of pictures can be improved by understanding focus.

As always, drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. If there are other things or other journeys you would like to see explored, just let me know. Use the links below.