Is Your Focus Focused?

Is your Focus spot on? Do you think you MIGHT have a problem with Focus?

There could be a couple things that may be hindering you from bringing your Focus……..well, in Focus.

1. Are you hard of hearing? WHAT?! What does this have to do with focus? (read on)
2. Do you know why those focus points in your view finder are 2 different formats…….horizontal and vertical? (read on)

First, I’m going to speak for myself here and SOME of you may be able to relate. If this doesn’t apply to you…..you’re one lucky camera bug! Some of you may remember a post or two I made a while back where I was thinking there was something wrong with either my camera or lens. Well, actually there was because I dropped it and had to send it off to Nikon, but that’s another story. What I’m going to talk about now is AFTER the camera was returned…….I STILL thought something was wrong……..I JUST COULDN’T BRING MY IMAGES INTO FOCUS! So very frustrating!

Along the way, from then until now…….it’s been hit and miss. Want to know something? I AM HARD OF HEARING……and believe it or not, that CAN affect your Focus! You know how your camera makes that little beeping noise when the focus locks onto something? I’ve discovered that I can no longer hear that beep. BUMMER!

Sometimes when the focus is WAY off, I can see the little focus point kind of hopping around in the view finder. That’s good because I KNOW it’s not focused. But sometimes, it doesn’t do that for me and I may end up with some disappointing images. BUMMER again!

One thing I can do about this is buy myself either a cheap hearing aid or some type of sound amplifier so that I can hear that beep again. I WISH I could just go get a GOOD set of hearing aids but WOWZER…….they’re expensive!! AND my insurance won’t pay for them. Now I ask you…..what are us old folks supposed to do??

Here’s something else that has helped me and even if you’re NOT hard of hearing, it may help you too. You may already know this but I just found out about this recently and wanted to share! Here we go with the horizontal and vertical focus points that you see in your view finder.

I’m not going to go into HOW to use them because if you’re already shooting with a DSLR, you already know how to use them…….BUT……

I was watching a webinar the other day, called “The Photography Starter Kit” by John Greengo at Creative Live and here’s what I found out.

Simple…….the horizontal focus points are meant to focus on VERTICAL objects and the vertical focus points are meant to focus on HORIZONTAL objects. I went to my manual and looked up the information about the focus points but it doesn’t say anywhere in my manual about horizontal and vertical. However……I DID try this and it worked great for me! I could see a big difference in my focusing!

And by the way, the square focus point in the center will focus on both horizontal AND vertical objects. I tend to use that one most and if I want something on the right side of my view in focus, I just use the focus and recompose technique. Some people use the “back button” focus technique and you can find that explained in this article “Top 10 Mistakes that Cause Blurry Photos” over at Digital Photography School.

Here is another great article on “5 Tips for Getting Sharper Images” over at Digital Photography School.

I hope this post was helpful to you in some way. If you’re like me and are hard of hearing, I’d like to hear what you’ve done to overcome this obstacle in getting your Focus Focused.

I’m filing this post in the “Tutorials” section in case you’d like to revisit at some point. My Tutorials are listed in the 2nd menu down from the top.

Until next time,

Hugs and Have An Artistic Day!

Cheryl