Focus – The Art of Seeing

Focus – The Art of Seeing

A camera, no matter how automatic, is a lifeless piece of equipment until a person uses it. It then becomes a uniquely responsive tool, an expression of the photographers eye and creative mind.

Anyone can take amazingly beautiful photographs by simply taking a mental “walk” around a photo opportunity to view it from multiple perspectives. This will always result in important insights and fresh ideas.

Three of the most important factors as you begin to understand the ‘Art of Seeing’, are:

• Light
• Focus
• Composition

Understanding and using these to your advantage to take better photos helps to develop your ‘Art of Seeing’.

Focus

One ingredient of great images is focusing the camera carefully.

Auto-focus (AF) technology today has made focusing as painless and as child proof as pressing a button. Still, to increase your percentage of sharp pictures, keep a few things in mind before you press it.

Most people don’t give much thought to taking a photo, after all, you only have to press the button and the camera does everything automatically. In fact a whole lot of things happen in that depression of the shutter button.

Practice gently pushing down on the button until you feel some resistance and usually at that point your camera may have light glow on the back and maybe make a little beep beep noise. At that point your camera has focused on the subject, determined the correct exposure and primed the flash. Pushing the button the rest of the way actually takes the photo. Every photographer should become proficient at priming the camera by half depressing the shutter button in anticipation of taking a great photo without any shutter lag.

All camera’s AF systems have a focus lock feature (usually activated by partially depressing the shutter button) that lets you focus on your subject, lock the focus, then recompose to put it where you want it. Careful practice and use of this feature lets you control the point at which the camera will select and use as its point of focus.

So pick the subject that you want to be prominent within the photo and ensure they are in focus. From that point you can think about whether you want other areas of the photo (foreground and background) to be in or out of focus. Pre-focusing or focus lock will allow you to set focus, compose and than wait in anticipation of the moment that you fully depress the button and take the photo. Keep in mind though, if you release your finger from the shutter button you will have to refocus and recompose your picture.

A new innovation that is becoming quite common place in cameras is face detection or face recognition. This is a great aid in detecting faces and tracking them anywhere within the viewing area. Different cameras can detect multiple faces but usually give priority of focus to the face closest to the camera. The other benefit of face detection is that it commonly doesn’t require you to focus lock and recompose if your main subject is not in the centre of the picture area.

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