During the last section, we focused on exposure and everything that we needed to know about it. Exposure is nothing short of an important concept in photography with it being part of your fundamentals as a photographer since it has everything to do with light.
We discussed about the exposure and its components which are the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. From that section, you should now be currently equipped with the proper logic you need in order to take photos in any given situation.
Learning exposure does not stop from knowing its properties and applications. Exposure is something you will be dealing with every single time your shoot a photo so it is important to keep on practicing what you have in you.
With that said, learning photography as a whole does not stop either which is why today we will be moving on to a new section. This section will be concerned with manipulating the depth of field and doing low-light photography.
This section is another level higher from the previous section but with your current knowledge now, you won’t have an extremely hard time at all.
Focusing First
Just how important is focusing?
Focusing is common knowledge for photographers and non-photographers alike. Once you see a misfocused or blurry picture, it is automatically branded as useless.
Every photo has a subject and unless you are shooting pitch black or white. You will always have something you want to emphasize on because if not, then what are you even shooting for, right? Whether you are shooting a person’s portrait or you just want to show the silhouette of the buildings, you will always have a certain area of emphasis.
With that said, the importance of focusing is unmatched, in fact, it is the first thing you do when taking pictures. It is also the first form of calibration you will be doing once you receive your camera.
Focusing
Before anything else, you first have to make sure that your camera is correctly calibrated for your eyesight. You or one of your peers may have experienced looking through the viewfinder and seeing a blurry landscape even though your camera is beeping already signalling that you are actually seeing a perfectly focused photo.
This scenario is caused by a camera’s viewfinder not being properly calibrated. To correct this, you have to adjust your viewfinder focus by adjusting the little knob or dial just beside it.
Not addressing this issue of focus may lead to errors in the future such as unusable blurry images.
Automatic vs. Manual
Focusing is a pretty straightforward already with the only areas of concern being the mechanism of the camera itself - automatic or manual. These two methods of focusing have their own strengths and weaknesses thus giving them certain edges over the other in different situations.
In order to change the focusing mode, simply look for the switch located at the far end of your lens near the body of your camera. You will see that the switch will have the letters AF and MF.
Automatic Focusing (AF)
The biggest advantage of using AF is its speed and accuracy. Being automatic, the whole burden of focusing will fall on the shoulders of your camera thus making it much more mechanical and accurate than the human eye.
The focusing mechanism of your camera relies on focus points. The camera detects objects to focus through these points and the mechanism itself is quite bias towards nearer objects.
However, although using AF is very convenient due to its combined reliability and speed, there is one downside. Automatic focusing relies on the mechanism of your camera and some cameras, particularly the entry-level ones, have lesser focus points as compared to the high-end ones.
With that said, if you are using an entry-level DSLR like the Nikon D300 or the Canon 1100D, you may yield more reliable results.
Manual Focusing (MF)
You may think that manual focusing or MF is nothing but a tedious way of focusing. Well, to tell you honestly you are not entirely wrong. However, although using MF can be tedious, it is actually the “creative” one between the two.
The biggest advantages of using MF is that it gives the user a better control of the depth of field. The depth of field, if you can still recall, is the one responsible for creating creative shots like bokehs by relying on the distance of a subject from its background.
By using manual focus, you can easily focus on which object you want and get creative with it.
Conclusion
So today we started a new section by talking about focusing. Focusing, as we said, is straightforward and common knowledge already around the world. The importance of focusing is unmatched due to the fact that a blurry image is an unusable one which means that it’s nothing but a wasted picture.
We discussed the two types of focusing mechanisms: automatic (AF) and manual focusing (MF). Each of these mechanisms has its own advantages and weaknesses making one suitable over the other in certain situations.
Today, we also touched on the concept of depth of field. This concept has huge implications for focusing which is why we are devoting the next lesson for this one.
Be sure not to miss that one and don’t forget to share these lessons with your colleagues as well!
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