With the cameras getting better and better, and also the focusing systems getting better, I still think manual focusing is still the way to go. And in this post, I will try to show you why, and also how to do it, so you get the best results all the time.

Why focus manually?

The reasons are divers, so let’s take a look at them.

1. Your camera can’t read your mind

The autofocus can be as good as it gets, but it can never really know what you try to take a photo off. You can help it by choosing your focus point, or use a single one all the time, but still, it will never be 100% accurate with focusing on what you want.

2. Your camera can’t see in the dark

Ok, neither can you, but you really don’t have to. When focusing in dark spaces or late at night, you need just a small area with a little light in it, to be able to focus onto. A single street lamp in the distance is mostly enough to get a sharp photo.

3. Your camera can’t focus on very small objects

Each camera has only a certain number of focus points. If you taking a wast landscape, or a your scene is mostly dark, and there are only few light sources, it’s hard to tell the camera to focus exactly on one of them. Or for instance you shooting a night sky, and want to get a good focus on the stars (I found out that just focusing on infinity, never really worked for me). With manual focusing, you can just choose a bright star and focus onto that.

4. To maximize the DOF (Depth of field)

If you wan’t or need to use a bigger aperture, using manual focusing can really help you adjust your DOF. You can really select the subject and have no fear that it will be out of focus.

5. To keep the same focus

This is especially if you shot HDR, time-lapse, or have a different reason to need multiple shots to be combined. If you use manual focus, you will never have to fear, that your camera will focus on something different in the middle of a sequence.

6. You want to do focus stacking

Focus stacking is a way, where you take photos with different focus, to get a bigger DOF from a combination of them. This is just such a pain to do with autofocusing. Especially if you just need two shots, one for background and one for the foreground. With manual focusing, you can do this very quickly, just by turning the focus wheel :)

When not to focus manually?

Of course there are situations, when manual focusing it not the way to go. Mostly this is when you try to get a moving subject. It’s really hard to focus manually then. Still, with a lot of practice, one can do also that. If you can estimate the DOF, so you subject is completely in focus, you can focus manually and take all the further shots without refocusing. If you taking photos of something that is really fast changing (for instance fireworks), not having to refocus, will get you many more photos.

How to focus manually?

So now you know why you should be focus, now let’s looks how to do it.

1. Switch your lens to manual focus

This one is really important. First of all, you don’t want to damage your lens. The better (pricier) lenses can be focused manually even with the auto-focus on, but on some this would damage your focusing motor. Also you don’t want the autofocus to change your hard work.

2. Use live view

It’s really hard to use manual focusing without a live view. You can of course do it through the viewfinder, but you will never be so accurate. What you need to do is go into live view and zoom into the exact area you want to focus onto. Most cameras allow for a 10 times zoom, which grants you the ability to focus very accurately. Just be gentle when using longer lenses, as every touch will make it shake, so making the focusing harder.

Normal live view

10x zoom

3. Focus 1/3rd into the scene

This is a basic rule of DOF. If you focus on something, than 1/3rd of DOF will be in front of it, 2/3rd’s behind it. Witch this in mind, of course one needs to focus 1/3rd into the scene. You don’t have to be really exact, as long as you are not going for a very shallow DOF. With a little practice and experimenting, finding the 1/3rd spot is a madder of seconds for every scene.

4. Focus on light sources

This is mostly for late night scenes and night sky. You just need a single light source to be able to focus. You can even create your own using a flashlight. Just find the light source on your screen and focus onto it. Than try to refocus, while looking at the shape of the light source. The smaller it is, the sharper your shot will be. To say it differently, if you see a bokeh, you are not focused correctly.

To the right you have an example of a scene, where your camera would have a very hard time to fins something to focus on, but manually it’s done in seconded.

5. Remember the basic rules of DOF

To make this easier for you, always remember the basic rules of DOF. The smaller aperture, the further away the subject and the wider the lens, the bigger DOF you will get. So especially with landscape shots, if you are using a wide angle lens, once you focus on anything just few meters away, you will get everything in focus. You don’t need to know the exact DOF for every setup, but knowing if you should expect a shallow or a deep DOF is always good.

6. Practice manual focusing

On every camera, there is a certain order of steps (button presses) to get into manual focus. With a little practice one can do those without even needing to look at the camera at all. For instance on my 5D mark II I can do this by pressing the live view, using the joystick to move the zoom square and then press zoom until I get to 10x magnification. If you doing multiple shots after each other, you don’t even need to leave the live view between shots.

Using a DOF calculator to help you focus

One way to be more exact with the focusing, is using a DOF calculator. There can be found many of them for every mobile platform. A DOF calculator, is a piece of software, that based on the focal length, aperture and focus distance, can tell you exactly, how much DOF you will get. You can use it easily, to determine the focusing distance, if your goal is a specific DOF.

DOF Calculator on Android

DOF Calculator Pro on Windows phone

I don’t think it’s that useful in the field, as it take too much time, but it’s a great tool to look at, to get better familiarized with one’s own lenses. Just enter the values, and then just change the focusing distance, to see how the DOF changes.

That’s all on Manual focusing, but feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Is it really another Monday already? Looks like it is. So as almost every Monday, let’s take a look at one of my photos and how it was edited. For today I will show you this interior shot, taken in the church of the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary.

So let’s first look at the final, and the starting image. As you can see, the dynamic range of the scene was quite high, from the very bright window in the back to the dark shadows around the corners. This all needed to be corrected into a dynamic range, that can be show in one photo.

 
I took 6 shots here, as I wanted a -3EV for the window. As always I started with Lightroom, where I removed lens distortions, chromatic abberations, and corrected the horizon line. I then exported all the files as 16-bit tiffs to be used in Oloneo Photoengine.

 
Here you can see the files in Oloneo Photoengine, and the result of Photoengine edit. If you would like to try this yourself, you can. Just go here to download the files (all six 16-tiff brackets I used, just resided to 2000 px wide versions) and you can get the trial of Oloneo Photoengine here.

 
I only changed the strength and contrast in Oloneo Photoengine, and maybe a little warmer white balance. From there I loaded the result into Photoshop, and I haven’t even added any of the original files, as I seen no need for them. Then I did the following edits:

1. Oloneo Photoengine result.
2. A copy of the first layer, on which I used warp to change the left side, so it more matches the right side.
3. Color Efex Detail Extractor to get more detail in the photo.
4. Imagenomic Noiseweare to remove noise from the photo
5. Color balance to make the highlight a little more warmer.
6+7. Added glow to the photo, just removed it with a brush from few areas, that were too saturated afterwards.
8. The light areas were to colorless for me, so with a soft brush, with orange color I painted them using a layer set to soft-light.
9. Color balance once more, as I felt the photo is still to purple.
10. I still wasn’t satisfied with the symmetry at the end, so once more I used warp to correct the photo even more. That’s what happens when one needs to take photos in a hurry and does not center the camera properly :)

 
And that’s all I did with this image. To find out more on how I edit, check out the guides and before after categories on this blog, or check out my video tutorial series here:

I had this beautiful car available for a small photo-shoot today. As always it’s nice to shoot something different from time to time. Took me a long time to think of a nice (or interesting place) to go to, but in the end I remembered that there is a not very used road right under the highway close to my flat. So that’s where we went.

I took quite a few photos, so you will probably see more of them here. I regret a little that I forgot to use a polarizing filter, to try at least to remove a little of the reflection. But one learns best on ones own mistakes, so will know next time :) This photo is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, finished in Photoshop. And you can see one behind the scenes shots on the side.

Shooting in such a strong midday sun is really not ideal, but since I was in Dubai, I had to take at least few daytime shots. This one if from the Dubai Marina yacht club, and I took it quite quickly as I was warned that in this area the security guards tend to stop people with tripods. But that time, nobody stopped me :)

This is a HDR from 5 exposures, created in Oloneo Photoengine, bust most of the finished result is from a single exposure, edited in Lightroom. I also used a polarizing filter to get the blue sky.

So I though it was again time to update the wallpapers section on this blog. This time the theme for these three new wallpapers is landscape shot from Austria, and I hope you will like them :)

As always, you can choose either a 1920×1200 or 1600×1200 resolution.

Btw. all the wallpapers can also be found in this smugmug gallery in my portfolio here: www.hdrshooter.net/Wallpapers/