May 01 2008
What To Focus On.
In our last tutorial we talked about how to make your pictures come out nice and sharp. Today we are going to learn about proper focus. What I mean by proper focus is that in most situations your camera will not render the entire scene in sharp focus, so you will have to choose what to focus on before you take the shot. I am going to start with the most photographed subject in the world, people. When you are taking a picture of a person you have to take special care to focus specifically on the eyes. The way to do this is to place your subjects eyes in the center of the frame and gently press the shutter button halfway down, you should hear a beep which confirms that focus has been attained. Then just recompose the shot while keeping the button pressed halfway down then gently squeeze the button to take the picture. you should now have a nice portrait with the eyes in sharp focus. Anytime you are composing a shot you have to decide what your subject is and then what part of your subject has to be in sharp focus. Using the mode dial on your camera to select the type of scene or subject your are going to shoot will help to set some of the settings in the camera to help decide how much of the shot will be in sharp focus. For example in a portrait you want a very small portion of the scene in focus and on the other end for a landscape you want as much of the scene in focus as possible. Play around with focusing on different parts of the same subject and then download them to your computer and look at the differences in each shot.
In all of your pictures you should use the above technique of pressing the shutter button halfway to achieve focus on your desired subject and then recomposing the shot to finish your shot.
Coming up next in Digital Photography 101: How to make sure your exposures are correct.
Published by: Gene Fetty http://www.freephototutorials.com ©2008
