Posts Tagged ‘Plane of focus’

Macro & Close-up Photography Tips – Focusing

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Focusing for macro and close-up photography is usually best done manually. At close-focus distances lenses can sometimes find it hard to lock focus. If a lens racks the focus out to infinity and then back again before it finally focuses on the subject, this can take some time. It may not even be able to find focus on the subject, and leave you with an unfocused image in the viewfinder.

DSC_1355
DSC_1355 by Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix) on flickr (licensed CC-BY) - photo taken using manual focus

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

July 28th, 2013 at 12:13 pm

Macro & Close-up Photography Tips – Aperture, DoF, Diffraction

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When you take a photo of a landscape, it's not too difficult to get everything from a few feet in front of you all the way to the horizon in focus. But as you get closer to your subject and the magnification level increases, the depth of field (amount of the image in focus) rapidly drops off.

In macro and close-up photography, depth of field is so narrow it is usually measured in millimeters. So taking photos where more than just a thin sliver of the image is in focus can be tricky.

Even at an aperture of f/8, depth of field covers just a small part of this butterfly's mustache
The depth of field in this image covers just a small part of the butterfly's mustache

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Written by Discover Digital Photography

April 8th, 2013 at 8:06 pm