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Community Corner

Let's Get Focused

You can fool your camera into taking a perfectly focused photograph.

In this article I will try to help you avoid those out of focus shots – the ones you look at and say, ”How did that happen?”. Let me explain. 

Most, if not all, “point and shoot” cameras have an auto focus function. You may want to read the instruction manual to learn more about how the camera works, and you will be well served to do so. 

Just like the , auto focus, too, can be fooled. Let me set the scene like this:

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You have two people before you to photograph, and you want to fill the frame with their faces.  You are in the open; the sun is at your back, so what can go wrong?    They stand shoulder to shoulder, and you back up or zoom in as seems appropriate, then take the shot. 

Then you check the photo only to find that their faces are a little blurry. That’s not what I saw, you think, and you are right. The camera shot what it saw. 

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As good as the camera’s electronics are, they are no match for the human eye-to-brain connection. When you look over the scene, your eye focuses instantaneously between near and far elements, and your brain remembers that. 

Not so with the camera. It sees what is in the center of the viewfinder – in this case, the space between and behind the subjects. That space may be hundreds of yards away. 

The solution is this: Before taking the shot, put one of the faces in the center of the viewfinder, press the shutter release half way down, re-compose, (say cheese) and take the shot. 

You have fooled the camera again. More on focusing in later articles. 

snapshot

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