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Focus Is An Option
15 July 2015
With the speed and convenience of autofocus, it's easy to forget that focus is an option. But it's not so easy to forget when you slap on an old manual focus prime to see the world through 1980's eyes.
We liked these yellow flowers against the dark background of some evergreens but we had two problems with the shot.
The first was the wind. Whatever was in focus one split second was flying out of the focus plane the next.
When we raised the camera to frame the yellow flowers they were blurred into dabs of color. We loved it.
The second was that, even without the wind, getting all the flowers in focus would have sharpened up the background too. Our focal length and distance from the subject guaranteed that.
Or so we thought. Maybe at f5.6 we would have found the sweet spot. But then the wind would have made its mark. At f2.8 we could shoot at 1/500 second to freeze the flowers against that blurred background we liked.
But we had just shot some blackberries, focusing as close as we could get. When we raised the camera to frame the yellow flowers they were blurred into dabs of color. We loved it.
Artists gave up painting detail with single-haired brushes when photography came along. What was the point? they wondered. They couldn't compete with photography when it came to realism. So they started using rags, wiping color onto the canvas, and scrubbing it in with their fingers.
Time to respond to the challenge with fields of unfocused color.
It doesn't have to be recognizable just because you used a camera. Focus is an option, after all.
