0:00 this video is brought to you by Squarespace if you need a website or a domain visit squarespace.com hey everybody and welcome to a new video do you have a problem with photos where your subject isn't in Focus your focus is on the background rather than your subject or not all of the scene is in Focus like you hoped in this video I'm going to share my very best techniques so you can nail that Focus every time and don't forget to stay till the end where I'll share a tip that will make your camera Focus faster than ever even on quick moving subjects my name is simal Donal and I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for wildlife and nature photography subscribe if you want to see [Music] more now I've already made a video on
0:46 Focus settings so this one will be focused on field techniques to see that video focused pun intended on settings have a look here but come back so what does being in Focus mean anyway and what is this depth of field thing I need to explain these to you for my advice later to make any sense first the depth of field is the part of the photo kind of a slice in space between the nearest point and the furthest point where the photo is in acceptably sharp Focus I say acceptably sharp as Focus doesn't go from poor to Perfect all at once so the area in focus is the place where light rays converge to a point and a small area in front of this and behind this that are of acceptable Focus will look accept sharp to us in a photo the
1:32 thinner the depth of field the blurrier the background looks the deeper the depth of field the more in Focus the background and foreground will be there are three variables that will affect this depth of field one getting closer will make the depth of field thinner consequently being farther makes the depth of field deeper two longer focal lengths will make the depth of field thinner while at F4 my 16 mm lens may have lots of the image in focus on my 600 mm lens at F4 only a thin slice is in focus and the background gets very very blurry and three smaller apertures that is larger F numbers make the depth of feel deeper so shooting at f11 has much more of the image and focus than f2.8 which has a thinner depth of field
2:18 let's tackle Focus issues by genre as that's how most people will come across them in real life one of the keys to understanding how to use the depth of field to your advantage in Landscapes and architecture or any genre where you want large expanses in focus is to know if your depth of field is deep enough to include the whole image and to know that we need to understand something called a hyperfocal distance this is the distance at which everything Beyond this distance can be brought into an acceptable focus at the hyperfocal distance the focus area will start at half the distance to the focus point and extend all the way to Infinity so focused here everything from here half the distance to Infinity here we'll be in Focus you can use apps
3:03 to calculate hyperfocal distance for you I use an app called photo pills to plan my astrophotography and it even includes hyperfocal tables so let's say I'm using the 16 mm lens wide open at f2.8 and I want to photograph a flower at 1 M or 3 ft away but also get the mountains in the distance basically at Infinity in Focus according to these tables the hyperfocal distance for this combination of camera focal length and aperture is 3 m or about 10 ft and the closest part of the photo in Focus would be half of that 1.5 M or 5 ft the flower is too close to being Focus but as we saw earlier smaller apertures can make the depth of field deeper if we reduce the aperture size by making the F number
3:51 f4.5 the new hyperfocal distance is just under 2 m and the closest point in focus is half of that less than 1 M so now our flower is in Focus as well as the mountain by making our aperture a smaller f4.5 from the original f2.8 the lesson here is that the smaller the aperture the closer the hyperfocal distance and the better odds that everything will be in Focus also the fact that this is a very wide lens makes the hyperfocal distance closer too the f2.8 hyperfocal distance on this 50 mm lens is 30 m not 3 m like the 16 mm lens the coroller here is if you want everything in Focus use shorter focal lengths as longer focal lengths have shallower depths of field for this shot
4:38 these Rock structures in the foreground are only a meter away how did I get them all in Focus did I use hyperfocal tables no I use my knowledge that small apertures and wide angle lenses make for close hyperfocal lengths so I shot this at 24 mm and F14 which I knew would make things very close all all the way to Infinity in focus in this case looking up the table after the fact tells me that everything 2/3 of a meter or 2T to Infinity are in Focus but here's the shortcut I used using wideangle lenses if you place your focus point at the oneir point along the scene you maximize the chances that all is in Focus so Focus here in the scene using a single Focus point or manually focusing while
5:24 looking in the back LCD to get the depth of the field to start here at the half way point and go all the way to Infinity I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video Squarespace for many photographers having our photos on social media has defaulted to somehow become our portfolio and I'm not sure that's the right direction our social media is often a combination of our professional work and our personal lives and sometimes what we're up to and not very well organized and everyone's got a social media presence these days but when we want to build credibility with potential clients and differentiate ourselves and present our work for sale we need more more customized tool for the job and that's a website like my site I built with Squarespace having your own Squarespace website builds a more refined public face for your work presented and organized like you want it
6:12 and websites are Far and Away Superior for commercialization with a Squarespace site you can display your products in galleries have an online store and even monetize your content by offering memberships to exclusive content in private sections of your website you can even offer free downloads and exchange for subscribing to your newsletter I built my own website using Squarespace and it was easy head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com Simon to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain so let's get back to using smaller apertures for more depth of field you may be thinking can I just make the aperture smaller and smaller to make things really really close in Focus too along with the background in real life no that's because at really high F numbers like
6:58 F16 or greater there's a phenomenon called defraction that actually makes your images softer the smaller you make the aperture so F14 is about my limit don't try F22 for example to get everything in Focus also don't forget that at these really small apertures you often need long shutter speeds to get enough light which means getting a tripod another workaround to not having enough depth of feel to get the whole scene in focus is using focus stacking I use this in my astrophotography because I can't stop The Lens down to F14 in the dark I need to shoot the Milky Way at fast apertures like f1.4 or 1.6 also shooting the dark foreground at F14 would take an hour it's dark out there so what I do is I shoot two or three images with thin depths of field but
7:43 focused at the foreground midr and infinity and do what's called focus stacking where I combine them in Photoshop where I only use the INF Focus section of each photo like this this and this and make one composite with all the InFocus SE together like these a quick note if you subscribe to my email list you can download for free my guide to shooting and backlit situations Link in the description below now what if you're not trying to get the whole scene in Focus like in a landscape shot but rather you shoot portraits or wildlife and like a thin depth of field to get nice blurry backgrounds to make your subject pop from the frame this is often done with longer focal lengths like a portrait using a 70 to2 200 f2.8 or wli at 600 mm F4 what do you do then first
8:29 the the depth of field is very thin on these setups a 200 mm lens at f2.8 at 5 m distance only has a depth of field of a few cim an inch or two on my 600 mm lens it's only a few millimeters this means three things one to get things in really good Focus we need our Focus point to be accurate with portraits or wli we often want the eye to be in Focus but with the depth of field so Raisor thin we need to get the eye dead on otherwise an eyebrow or a be beak will catch our Focus point one tip is to choose the smallest Focus point you can amongst your focus Point choices on your camera avoid larger Focus modes that have several points and use eye detector if you have it it's a great feature two make sure you're using continuous
9:14 autofocus and not one shot if your subject is moving and you're shooting in bursts if you're in one shot your first shot will be in focus and not the others or even the slightest movement of a few millimeters will make the eye slightly autofocus if you're focus is locked on like in one shot mode and third increase the depth of field if it's just too thin by stopping down your lens a bit taking portraits with an 885mm f1.4 lens can be a real challenge with super thin depths of field if the background is far enough behind your subject you can always make the aperture a bit smaller like f2.8 and both make it easier to get the iron Focus but also get all the features of the model in focus and you can still get a blurry background the same thing with wli you don't need to shoot a lens at its widest aperture when birds get
10:01 really close to me the depth of field gets super thin so I'll sometimes stop The Lens down a bit to F5 or f5.6 to get more of the subject in Focus like in these photos of Mine by the way you may be wondering out of curiosity with really long focal lengths like 600 mm what is the hyperfocal distance that is at what distance with everything being focused in a lens like that well at F4 it's 3 km almost 2 miles so when I'm shooting Big Sur like in this footage a kilometer away I can't actually get everything in Focus but it matters not here's a serve shot taken at 500 mm from almost a kilometer away the fact that the foreground isn't T sharp and not in Focus isn't an issue one problem that people have in capturing action in focus
10:47 is getting the focus to lock onto your subject be wad life fast cars or pets they end up focused on the background and the subject is soft one feeli technique to help your camera get both a fast focus and an accurate one is to prefocus that means placing your focus on a distance that's equal to where you think that action is likely to happen the more in focus and visible it is the easier it is for your camera to find it and start focusing on it the physical distance that the lens needs to move the lens elements to get in focus is less and will take less time to happen for a faster focus in short the closer your focus is to the plane where the subject will appear the faster and more accurately everything about Focus will happen so how do you implement this in the field the trick is that when you expect some action point at something
11:34 close to that distance a tree a fence a clump of grass and hit the focus button then after you focused take your finger off the button and leave the camera focused at that distance wait for your subject to arrive and when they do point at it and hit the focus button it should acquire it much more quickly another tip is that many cameras especially mirrorless cameras are better at pushing the focus out out than pulling it in so given the choice between pre-focusing right in front of you or at Infinity pre Focus close to you avoiding the phenomenon of the camera Focus being stuck on the background which can be hard to recover from if you found this video deserving please give it a like and YouTube will share it with other photographers struggling with Focus issues helping them to get that shot in
12:20 focus and I hope that you can use these tips too the very next time you go out to come home with your own unique and InFocus photos I know you can do it
