Tack sharp focus, Unsharp mask, out-of-focus, bokeh, Gauss­ian blur, motion blur, shal­low focus, depth of field, soft focus. These are all terms used to define the qual­i­ty of the sharp­ness of a pic­ture. And they are all good key­words to have in the begin­ning of this post.

Pho­tog­ra­phers may artis­ti­cal­ly use the full range, from exact focus to com­plete­ly blurred, often in a sin­gle pic­ture. As you will see, there is quite a bit to think about and my inten­tion is to explore and doc­u­ment the var­i­ous tech­niques used to achieve that desired focus on a con­sis­tent basis. As always, this blog is pri­mar­i­ly for my own edu­ca­tion. And I hope you ben­e­fit as well.

I will start this mul­ti-part jour­ney sim­ply. Folks show me their pic­tures and I enjoy look­ing at them. So many are unin­ten­tion­al­ly out of focus, often due to the sim­ple mis­un­der­stand­ing of how mod­ern cam­eras use auto focus.

Push the shut­ter release halfway down and hold it there before tak­ing the pic­ture. This acti­vates the auto focus and auto expo­sure func­tions and allows the cam­era time to adjust to a gen­er­al­ly good pic­ture.

This seemed obvi­ous to me, until I met some­one that did not real­ize that this is how cam­eras work. There was instant and dra­mat­ic improve­ment in their pic­tures when I point­ed this out. This instruc­tion is prob­a­bly on the first page of the first chap­ter of your cam­era man­u­al, but many peo­ple do not real­ize its’ impor­tance. Many folks are used to Insta­mat­ic cam­eras with fixed lens­es. That shut­ter release has only one func­tion, to release the shut­ter. When they buy their first point and shoot cam­era, they assume it works in a sim­i­lar man­ner.

There is more to this halfway shut­ter release that we will use in a vari­ety of focus­ing tech­niques. It also per­forms oth­er func­tions. If you are view­ing a pic­ture or have the menu up on the LCD screen, it resets the cam­era in prepa­ra­tion to take a pic­ture. It turns on teleme­try in the view find­er or an infor­ma­tion win­dow so you can check a vari­ety of set­tings. It is the most used func­tion on dig­i­tal cam­eras and cru­cial for get­ting the most out of auto focus.

More to come…