focus

How to Fix Blurry Pictures and Take Tack Sharp Photos

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.

How To Get Super-Sharp Photos Every Time, With Any Camera

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.

What is Hyperfocal Distance and How Do You Find It?

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.

How To Focus Stack the Right Way For Landscape Photography

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.

Using LiDAR to Add Autofocus to an f/0.95 Manual Focus Lens

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.

A Beginner’s Guide to Focus for Landscape Photography

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.

A Beginner’s Guide to Focus Stacking

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.

Is Back-Button Focus Becoming an Outdated Photography Technique?

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.

Beginner’s Guide to Focus Stacking for Macro Photography

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.

Camera Makers, Please Bring Back the Custom Focus Limiter

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.

The Ultimate Focus Stacking Guide for Landscape Photographers

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.

Improve Your Astrophotography Focus With a Bahtinov Mask

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.

Lensbaby Edge 50 Optic: This Is Not A Review

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.

Simple Trick Helps You Find Hyperfocal Distance Without Charts or Apps

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.

Here’s a Look at Panasonic’s New ‘Post Focus’ Feature in Action

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.

Using Focus Stacking to Shoot Ultra-Sharp Photos of Household Objects

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.

Panasonic ‘Post Focus’ Feature to Rely on Rapid-Fire Focus Bracketing

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.

Ten Years of Shooting a Single Alleyway in Norway

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.