Hey y’all! Deeana is bringing us another post for Photography Tip Tuesday…and this time on Focal Point! Be sure to check out Deanna’s site here and our other posts can be found by going to the navigation bar on the top of my website and clicking “Photography”.
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Happy Tuesday friends! Last week we talked about being able to achieve that perfect blurry background and we briefly touched base on how it’s important to focus on the eyes. Today, we are going to talk a little more about focusing and how exactly to focus so that what you want is in focus. When you have your settings set at a wide open aperture (smaller F stop) that does help obtain your perfect blurry background, but it also leaves more room for error and making your subject blurry too, so it’s very important you really pay attention to exactly what you are focusing on. If you notice every picture your take what you want is out of focus, you may what to first look and make sure your auto focus is on (on most canons there is a button on the back on your camera that says AF-ON hit that). There is other ways to focus but we’ll discuss that at a later time as it is a little more complicated. If you do not see this button as an option on the back of your camera then simply google “how to turn on auto focus on _______ (type the camera model you have)”. The second thing you want to make sure you are doing is actually choosing the right thing to focus on. Here is an example of the display screen you are looking at (will vary slightly depending on you camera model) you want to select the options circled below.
Then you should see this…
Now you are going to look through your view finder and turn the wheel on the top of your camera until the highlighted square is on what you want in focus. Again if your subject is a person focus on the eyes, if your subject is a plant focus right in the middle of the plant, if you are shooting details such as a purse make sure the center of the purse is in focus. It’s so easy to accidentally focus on the wrong thing in your view, so take your time – sometimes it takes a few shots until it’s perfectly to your liking. Here are a few examples of what happens if you focus on something right next to your subject.
As you can see the picture on the left is completely out of focus and the picture on the right the green grass to the left of her is in focus.
And here is one more example where the picture on the left the whole thing is out of focus as where the picture on the right the wall to the left of her is in focus rather than her.
So, don’t get discouraged, it happens to all of us. Take a deep breath, make sure your auto focus is on, and manually select your focal point!
Leave us any questions you have below!!
xo,
Deeana & Bess
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