Creative Composition: Close-Ups and Autofocus

By Rob Sheppard

(c) Rob Sheppard

I love close-ups. They truly bring you into a different world that we normally don't see. And I am not talking about super close work, either. Any time we get in close to a natural subject, we are looking more deeply at the world around us in a way we usually don't do. In a way, the act of close-up photography gets us to pause and observe details that we might otherwise pass on by.

One challenge that comes from close photography is the focus point. When you are close, depth of field is very narrow, no matter what f-stop you use, so the actual point of focus becomes very, very important. This is even more critical when you play with extremely shallow depth of field as I often like to do.

(c) Rob Sheppard

Autofocus can be really challenging when you are up close. I will usually shoot manual focus when I am doing any close-up work with any lens. The challenge the camera has is that depth of field is always very limited (and gets less and less the closer you get). Yet there are many points where the camera can focus and it will "choose" its focus point rather arbitrarily - often visually the wrong point for the subject and the composition.

My preference is this:

1. Change the camera/lens to manual focus

2. Roughly focus on the subject to get a basic distance

3. Then without changing the lens' focus, move the camera toward and away from the subject until the right point is in focus

4. Take the picture

5. You can be careful as you do this so you do not have camera movement during exposure that will make the image soft.

When you manually change focus of the lens up close instead of doing what I just described, you can find it harder to focus partly because of a curious thing that happens when you are close. The size of the subject in your camera's view changes because magnification changes with focus distance. That slight change in size of subject can make it harder to see the focus change on the subject itself.

Both of these close-ups are from the redwoods. The first is in the Dicentra or bleeding heart genus and is often called squirrel corn when it is so white. The second is a redwoods sorel flower.


Notes:

• Outdoor Photographer editor at large and author Rob Sheppard teaches many excellent online photo courses at BetterPhoto, including Creating Storytelling Photos, The Magic of F-stops: Choosing the Right Aperture and Composition Boot Camp.

• Rob is also a contributor to the new book (co-authored by Jim Miotke and Kerry Drager): The BetterPhoto Guide to Photographing Light (publication date: April 2012)

Comments

[Dr. F.Zaman]

"3. Then without changing the lens' focus, move the camera toward and away from the subject until the right point is in focus"........this is a nice advice