7/13/2023 0 Comments Professional rawdiggerTo make things worse, when you reframe, more often than not you actually rock forward a little, moving the camera further forward still, moving the focus plane back even more.īecause of these things, it’s really just so much better when shooting portraits to get into the habit of moving your focus point to sit over the subject’s eyes. Even with a relatively small aperture, you may still be able to tell that you did not focus on the eyes, and that will ruin your portrait unless you intended the subject to not have sharp eyes. See how the plane of focus is now quite a way behind the subjects eyes? If you are using a wide aperture with shallow depth of field, you’d lose the critical focus on the subjects eyes. This reframing and the plane of focus shift is shown by the red lines. Then you realize that there’s a lot of space over the subjects head, and that looks amateurish, so you keep your finger half pressed on the shutter button to maintain your focus, then tilt your camera down to reduce the space over their head. Imagine you are doing a portrait of someone, and you focus on their eyes, because it’s important to get the eyes sharp, but with the center focus point, which is represented by the black lines. Here’s a quick diagram to illustrate what I mean. You can simply focus by placing your focus point over what you want to focus on, press the back AF button with your thumb and then take your thumb off the AF button, and reframe.Īs an aside, if you are using a very wide aperture with extremely shallow depth of field, you still need to be careful when reframing, because the plane of focus moves if you change the angle of the camera when reframing. Of course, these days, we can much more easily move the focus point around and with mirrorless cameras now we can often move that focus point to pretty much anywhere in the frame, so there really isn’t any reason not to do that, but it can sometimes be more efficient to simply focus with the center focus point and then reframe when you want to make your exposure, and if you don’t have your shutter button assigned to active your focusing, you don’t have to hold the shutter button down while reframing. If you are currently half-pressing your shutter button and reframing to take your photo, there may be times when that becomes a little bit tiresome. The reason I was hooked on back button focusing is because it enables you to completely separate the act of focusing from the exposure and actually releasing the shutter. In the coming weeks I’d forget to focus a number of times, and had to reshoot a few of my landscape shots, either because I’d forgotten to focus, or I couldn’t remember if I’d focused or not, so paranoia set in, and the screens on the cameras back then weren’t really good enough to to reliably check critical focus, so I reshot some images. By the afternoon, I’d started to get it drilled into me what was happening, and although still frustrated, the benefits had started to become obvious to the point that I knew I had to stick with it. My muscle-memory up to that point was all about half-pressing the shutter button to activate the focus and exposure metering and I often forgot that the shutter button was no longer activating the autofocus, and wondered why the lens wasn’t focusing, then a moment later I’d recall what I’d done and hit the back AF button. The first morning using back button focus was frustrating to say the least. I set my camera up so that the shutter button no longer activated the camera’s autofocus, and went out shooting at the Ueno Zoo here in Tokyo. It must be around 15 years or so ago now, when the original MBP Forum was full of great enthusiastic photographers sharing thoughts on a daily basis, and a number of people were talking about back button focus, so I decided to give it a try. I was reminded of this today’s topic in the new MBP Community for our Patreon contributors this week, so I figured I’d spend a little time today talking about why I use Back Button Focus, how I set it up on my Canon Cameras, and I’ll also explain how using the back AF button can help you to switch between various focussing modes without actually changing the camera or lens settings.įirst of all, let’s back up a little and talk about how I got started using the back AF button on my cameras.
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