For those of you with digital SLRs, this photography tip is for you. Have you ever taken an image and it showed up a little something like this…?
Oops! The camera focused on the wrong thing! What the…? Well have no fear! This photography tip on auto focus and focusing is just for you!
Most Canon digital SLRs have 9 focus points, as seen represented by the little boxes in the image below. These are the outlines of what you see when you look through the viewfinder:
Your camera focuses on whatever box is highlighted red, as seen below where the focus is in the center of the frame. Generally in AF, or Auto Focus, the camera has all focus points active and will choose the focus point for you.
Usually your camera is pretty smart in picking what to focus on, but if you’re anything like me, usually isn’t [ever] good enough. This is where changing the settings on your own comes in handy (raise the roof for manual shooters, oh ya). To select a single focus point, press the focus point selection button, as seen below on the left. You will then toggle through the focus points and select which box you’d like, using either the top dial as seen in the middle image, or with the dial shown on the right.
And wa la! An image focused how you want it to be! Don’t leave it up to you camera, folks. We’re smarter than our cameras, so we need to tell them what to do, okay?
A big thanks to the beautiful Carie Cruz from Peas and Peanuts Photography for the portraits to illustrate our point here. After taking the Camera Basics photography class, Carie had emailed me asking a focusing question so I took the opportunity to share the lesson with ya’ll. Hope you enjoyed/learned/loved! You can check out the rest of Carie’s shoot here.
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