focal point | tips

Yesterday morning, Caleb went down for an early nap, so Maggie and I decided to play outside for awhile... bedhead, rainboots, and all. I've mentioned before that in many ways Maggie has grown immune to my camera. Trying to get her to smile on cue? Almost impossible. But I do love that I can catch her playing, and she doesn't even seem to notice that I'm taking pictures. And when we were about to go inside, she looked up at me with a huge grin and said, "Mommy, I'M a tographer!" So cute.

I have been thinking about posting some focusing tips for awhile. Quite a few of my friends, who also enjoy photographing their children, have asked how I get my pictures to "look" the way that they do. That's kind of a hard question to answer because so much goes into composing and taking a photo! But I think that using a lens with a wide aperture and properly focusing on the subject is a good place to start. I like to use my 50mm 1.2 lens for almost all of my personal photos, and I usually shoot with my aperture as close to 1.2 as possible. (Canon sells a 50mm 1.4 and a 50mm 1.8 that are more affordable options and produce a similar look!) But shooting that wide open leaves a lot of room for my subjects to be blurry. (And, in fact, they often are!) There are two things that I do that give me a better chance of having my shots in focus...

--The first thing that I do is use my back button to focus. I think this is achieved differently depending on your camera, but on my Canon 5D, I go into my menu and change custom function 4 from 0 to 1. Once I've done that, I can lock my focus by pushing the button with an asterick on the back of my camera. (This is the AE Lock button.)
-- I've also started changing my focal point. This isn't something I can do all the time... especially if I'm trying to capture quick action! But if the situation allows me to do it, I will often push the button on the back of my camera that is right next to the AE Lock button. I can scroll through while looking in the viewfinder and choose a new focal point. (This way, I don't always have to focus on the center and then recompose, which leaves more room for my image to be blurry.)

I hope this was helpful! Just FYI: All of the photos in this post were shot with a focal point that was off center.






Have a great Thursday!