Seriously Simple Photography Tips — Learn how to focus and recompose your picture

Seriously Simple Photography Tips
Learn how to focus and recompose your picture

One of the reasons why I really like using the center focus point (Don't let the camera determine where to focus!) is because it makes it easy to tell the camera where I want to focus. That makes it pretty easy to work in difficult lighting conditions, such as when there is a lot of shade and sun in the same picture. I simply focus that focus point on the part of the scene that I want to expose correctly, letting everything else fall where it may. This can be critical when you're taking pictures of people in natural or uncontrolled lighting conditions because the human skin is difficult to get to photograph properly.

Here is a picture of the Mission San Diego de Alcala:

 

In that picture, my focal point is the middle of the picture where I've placed a red dot. The camera saw it as an extremely sunny spot and so it decreased the exposure, either by increasing the shutter speed, increasing the f stop, decreasing the ISO, or any combination of those three settings so that the focal point would be in focus and exposed properly. While the very sunny area of the Mission is nice and clear, that's not the part of the Mission that I wanted. I wanted the bell tower to the left to be the best part of the picture, but I also wanted some trees to the left and some red tile roof to the right. So if I just focused on the bell tower, making it the center of the picture, I'd lose the red tile roofs at the right.

What I did was focus on the bell tower, letting the camera see that it was in shade. On most cameras you do that by holding the shutter button down halfway until it focuses. Once the camera saw that and adjusted the settings, I kept the shutter button pressed down halfway to force the camera to keep the settings that it just arrived at, refocused the central point of the picture, and then pushed the shutter button all the way down. That allowed me to get this picture:

 

Much better than the first picture. Hope you agree.

Of course, digital photo editing software will let you do lots of corrections back at the office, so I can make the first picture look like the second picture pretty easily, as I have done here:

 

I think the second picture still looks the best, but if I had spent, say, an hour in Lightroom instead of 2 minutes, I could make the first picture look identical to, or even better than, the second picture. However, spending an hour doing post-processing is not near as much fun as actually going outside and taking pictures that are great to begin with.

 

 

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