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Focus |
Camera autofocus systems are quite good. In most cases, you will not be able to focus as fast as the camera. Use that to you advantage. Here are some tips to help get your pictures sharp:
Use a faster shutter speed. Everyone has slight movements in their hands. Use a shutter speed over 1/30 sec to help with hand shake. Telephoto lenses enhance hand shake, so you may need a faster shutter speed.
Prefocus. This is especially important on compact cameras. Before you take a picture, hold the camera and track the subject. Press the shutter button half way to make the camera focus. As the subject moves, move with it. Keep pressing the shutter half way to make the camera refocus on the subject. Then when you are ready to take a picture, the camera has already focused. This will help speed the camera up a little, as well as help with sharper pictures.
Use a flash. When in doubt use a flash. Indoors, parties, low light, if you want a sharp picture in lower light, use a flash.
With hold the camera up to your eye. Do not hold the camera at arms length. Holding the camera close to your body help stabilize it. Set your elbows into your gut, hold the camera from the bottom and keep your arms in. This uses your whole body, not just your arms to hold and steady the camera. |
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Focus is fairly subjective, but still very important. Not every situation requires all elements in the scene to be in focus. However, when flipping through a fresh stack of pictures, the first prints to get discarded are the ones with poor focus. Focus also drives visual hierarchy. Visual heirarchy is the order of elements in the scene from most important to least important. If you take a picture of a soccer player, the most important element is the soccer player, not the fans in the background. Therefore the player is higher in the order than the background. You would want to make sure that the focus is on the player and not on the fans. Many times, a great picture is defined by the sharpness. Good focus can really make a picture stand out.
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Selective focus means that sections of the photograph are intentionally thrown out of focus to enhance the infocus areas. The subject can be in sharp focus and the remaining areas of the picture out. Sometimes the whole picture can be out of focus or in soft focus, which can create a more abstract or dreamlike feeling. Out of focus backgrounds can isolate the subject and bring them to the front. Think of the in focus areas having to earn the right of being important enough to be in focus. The aperture can also be used to effect focus using depth of field. Shallow depth of fields will blur the background and seen in the bottom picture.
(The top picture was taken with the focus at infinity. This allows for the whole picture to be in focus aperture allowing. Having everything in focus in this picture is important becuase the important object is the whole mountain.
In the bottom picture, the flower is isolated because of the out of focus background. If the white flowers in the background were in focus, the orange flower would seem less important.)
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| Be critical. Once again, if the picture is not what you want, take another picture. Focus is very important. Most cameras now, have very good autofocus systems, especially SLR cameras. Familiarize yourself with the autofocus system on your camera. They can be a huge help. In good light, the camera will almost always focus faster than you can. Camera autofocus systems use distance to to measure focus and sometimes can be fooled, especially in low light. However, most of the time, they can be better than your eye. |
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