Let's consider a situation. You went out for a photo shoot with your trusty camera or phone. On location, all the photos looked sharp on the small screen and when you returned to base and opened the photos on your computer you found some photos had missed focus. Worse in some photos the entire image seemed shaken and out of focus.
As a professional photographer, I use a lot of different cameras. At any given time, I can use really expensive full-frame cameras combined with the best glass money can buy, to mid-range cameras with kit lenses, all the way down to even compact cameras that fit in my pocket.
One of the more complex technical topics in photography is something called hyperfocal distance. At first glance, the basic definition of hyperfocal distance seems pretty straightforward: It’s the distance at which you focus your camera lens to get as much of your shot in focus as possible, from the foreground to the horizon.
I can't begin to tell you how many times I've lost a shot because I didn't think through the basics well enough. I would of course have my composition and exposure settings dialed in and with that determined, you would think that I have what I needed to get the shot. But, in some cases, that just isn’t enough.
Filmmaker Josh Yeo of MAKE.ART.NOW. recently tested DJI's LiDAR Focus module for the new RS 2 gimbal to see if it could accurately focus his manual Mitakon Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 III lens. If it can handle this, that means you can pretty much add autofocus to any camera and manual lens combination you want... and the results look VERY promising.
Landscape photographer and educator Mads Peter Iversen has put together a helpful focus 'primer' for the aspiring landscape photographers out there. In the video, he goes over auto and manual focus technique, his personal workflow, and a few basic tips and tricks that work well for him.
Focus stacking is a fun and easy technique you can do right at home with nothing more than your camera, lens, and editing software. In fact, the Fujifilm X-T2, X-T3, and X-T4 series of cameras—and many others—contain a "focus bracketing" feature that lets you do this automatically.
A Japanese patent from Sony hints at a future lens that would allow you to shoot first, and focus your photos later. By combining multiple smaller lenses into a single larger lens, the idea could open up a world of new imaging possibilities if it ever comes to pass.
After a development announcement last year and a lackluster teaser campaign, Nikon has finally unveiled their latest flagship full-frame DSLR for sports shooters and photojournalists: the Nikon D6.
As camera technology continues to progress, the way in which we operate them is changing as well. Photographers should always use the most familiar and effective technique to get the shot, and to that end I want to be clear about the purpose of this article: I’m not trying to convince anyone to blindly stop using back-button focus.
Techart has pulled off something pretty cool with its latest lens adapter. The so-called "Canon EF to Nikon Z Autofocus Adapter" (TZC-01) lets you use Canon EF glass on Nikon's mirrorless Z-Series cameras without sacrificing autofocus, auto exposure, aperture control, or lens stabilization.
Canon has officially confirmed that the new RF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM lens does, indeed, have a front-focusing issue at minimum focus distance, and revealed that a firmware fix will be released as soon as possible.
One of the greatest challenges in macro photography is the depth of field, or DOF for short. Not only does the zone of sharpness drastically fall off as we get closer to our subjects, other factors such as the lack of light and diffraction softening make it tricky to use narrow apertures on top of that.
Back in the Sony SLT days, the company included an incredibly useful feature into the a99 Mark II called the Custom Focus Limiter. It allowed you to limit your autofocus to any distance range you wanted, and by golly, we wish it were still a thing.
It’s becoming harder to get the entire image sharp with the constantly wider lenses and more extreme foregrounds that are used in today’s photography. Even optimal apertures aren’t enough to get both the foreground and background as sharp as desired. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, though. Focus stacking for sharper images has become a go-to technique for photographers of all levels to achieve images that are sharp all the way through.
Instagram just released a new camera format called "Focus" that brings the magic of iPhone Portrait Mode-style portraits to single-camera smartphones.
"Focus by wire" is a system found in many camera lenses these days. Here's a 9-minute video by TheCameraStoreTV that takes a look at what "focus by wire" is and some reasons it isn't that great.
Finding razor-sharp focus when shooting astrophotography can be hard – stars appear as point light sources, and there are no detailed surfaces to aid the eye in achieving focus. The Bahtinov Mask is a widely used tool that cleverly uses diffraction as a focusing aid.
Before I bought the Edge 50 optic earlier this year I did a bit of online searching to find out how people were using it, what their thoughts were and what sort of images they were creating with it. I found a few “proper” reviews but struggled to find any “this is what I’m doing and how I’m feeling about it” sort of posts.
You've heard the terms "varifocal" and "parfocal" to describe lenses, but do you know what these terms mean? Or why they matter? If you don't, this informative conversation between Vistek video producer Dale Sood and product manager Brian Young is the perfect place to start.
Here's a 2-minute video in which cinematographer Matthew Rosen explains how he pulled focus at high speed for detergent ad.
Hyperfocal distance—commonly defined as "the closest distance at which a lens can be focused while keeping objects at infinity acceptably sharp"—is critical for landscape photographers who want their whole frame in focus. Here's a trick for nailing hyperfocal distance without resorting to charts or smartphone apps.
Back in July, Panasonic announced an upcoming feature called "Post Focus" that allows photographers to select their focal point after photos are shot. Instead of using light field technology like Lytro or an array of cameras like Light, Panasonic's feature uses rapid-fire focus bracketing.
Panasonic has begun publishing videos around the world that show how the new feature works.
A few months ago, photographer Adam Flor and I embarked on a sweet project. The goal was to shoot items using different colored backgrounds and use focus stacking to get full sharpness while shooting with a shallow depth of field.
The process was kinda nuts, but after seeing how it was done it wasn’t so bad. First, we grabbed small household items that had tiny details to them.
A few days ago, we shared a report on how Panasonic was developing focus-after-you-shoot technology. The company made an official announcement on it today, but it turns out it's not the light field competitor to Lytro that we had thought.
Panasonic's new "Post Focus" technology actually uses a burst of photos at 4K resolution and 30fps to create a stack of images with focus set at difference distances for each shot. It's like focus bracketing on steroids.
For his project "In the Alley," Norwegian photographer Lars Andersen spent ten years visiting one particular alleyway in the city of Tromsø, Norway. In a country filled with unbelievable natural landscapes, Andersen chose to focus his lens on a seemingly mundane urban location to see what he could create.
Lytro has announced that it just raised $50 million to undergo a "strategic shift" in strategy. Instead of focusing on light field photography and refocusable 3D photos, the company plans to expand into the fields of video and virtual reality. A large number of jobs will be shed during this process.
Stay Focused is a new app that brings focus stacking to the iPhone. By shooting multiple photos at different focus distances and then combining them, the app allows users to capture images with a greater depth of field than a single iPhone snap may allow.
Lytro has released Version 4.1 of its desktop light field photo editing software, and one of the main new features is something called "Focus Spread." It's a revolutionary feature that takes advantage of Lytro's "shoot now, focus later" abilities, giving photographers the ability to control where focus starts and stops in a photo.
For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.
But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes "as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien."
According to a newly-published patent from Apple, the tech giant is looking to flex its muscles in the world of smartphone camera technology... quite literally.
Is it too much to ask that Apple spend their entire WWDC Keynote talking about photography-related things? Okay, yes... maybe it is. But that doesn't mean you should be left out of the loop, so here are the three major photo-related updates that Apple didn't have time to talk about during yesterday's keynote.
Defined by Google as, “the visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of a photographic image, especially as rendered by a particular lens,” Bokeh is a term that has become much more prominent in the past ten years or so than ever before, thanks to the photography community.
Google wants to give all Android users (or at least those running Android 4.4 and up) the opportunity to use a camera app designed by the same people who made the operating system, and so the company has decided to release a standalone 'Google Camera' app packed with a few features that will make it a very tempting download at the price of "on the house."
In addition to actually announcing the much-praised 50mm f/1.4 Art lens last week, Sigma also revealed a useful unknown feature for the new 50, as well as some hardware updates for their entire glass line-up.
If you're ready to have your mind blown for the next three and a half minutes, go ahead and press play. And keep in mind that the masterpiece your eyes are about to take in was anything but an easy task.
Created by videographer Daniel Stoupin from 150,000 22-megapixel RAW exposures, he put together a 4K masterpiece (despite Vimeo only showing it as 1080p).
This one is a little hard to interpret, but a recently published patent application from Nikon seems to pave the way for a new lens mount.
Fancy an always-in-focus lensless camera in your arsenal of image capturing tools? It could be a while, but we're one step closer thanks to "compressive sensing," a technology developed by Bell Labs in New Jersey.
FocusTwist is a new app for iOS devices that lets you shoot Lytro-style refocusable photographs using your phone or tablet. Photographs shot using the app are interactive and dynamic in their focusing: click (or press) any area of the scene to see that area of the photograph come into sharp focus.
Photographer Zack Arias created this video titled Signal vs. Noise to help his …