💡 We recommend the mega guide on photography focus where we tell you how to achieve precise focus in different situations.
I call it the King of Goals because, to me, it is. The 50mm f/1.4 lens (and similar ones, understand the 50mm f/1.8, the 35mm f/1.8, etc.) is, of all my photographic equipment, the piece that marked a before and after in my photography. I don’t know a single photographer who has used it and wasn’t IN LOVE with it. If you want to know more about the reason for this healthy obsession, read the article I dedicated to it.
If you are already a user of this lens, you may have noticed how sharp photos shot with it are. The way this lens focuses things makes for sharp focus no, next. Thanks to the wonderful Bokeh effect that you can create with it, extremely sharp and focused subjects are achieved, against softly blurred backgrounds. A delight to the human eye.
This kind of sharp, sharp focus comes with a small drawback: it’s easy to fall for a slightly out-of-focus photo. If this happens to you, know that it is not a problem with the lens itself but with the way you are using it. A delicate optical jewel like the 50mm f/1.4 requires a specific way of focusing that you must know and use. With the King of Targets you can’t just focus and shoot on the run like you would with any other target.
Here I explain how you can take pictures with this lens or with any other that has a wide aperture (mainly f/1.4 and f/1.8) and enjoy its wonderful focus with scalpel precision.
depth of field
Most of us who love this lens do so because of the generous and wide aperture it has. This lens allows you to shoot a photo with wide apertures (you already know that a wide lens aperture is represented by a small f/ value, right?). The lens can reach an aperture of f/1.4, which is a HUGE aperture. This allows you to capture incredible amounts of light, but also a very shallow depth of field. If you don’t know what depth of field is, you can review this article where I explain it in detail, but in short, depth of field is how wide or small the area in focus will be. A large depth of field means that the area in focus will be large in the photo. A shallow depth of field results in a very small pinpoint in focus.
With the following graph, you will surely see it very clearly.
When you focus with a lens like the King of Lenses and use a large aperture, that is, a small f/ value, like f/1.f4 for example, you are opting for a very very small depth of field. Remember that this will cause the area in focus to be very small.
With this setting, we normally focus, and once the subject is in focus, we shoot.
One moment.
Between the moment we focus, and the moment we shoot, many things happen.
I know that it is very little time, we speak of seconds. Maybe less, but still, it gives time for many things to happen. Maybe we talk to the subject, we say something like “Ready, shoot now?” either “You’re already focused, I’m going to shoot. Do not blink”. Sometimes we don’t even say anything. We focus and immediately shoot.
The reality is that, between the moment of focus, and the moment of shooting, that short time that elapses is enough time in which our body holding the camera suffers movement of the torso/back, sometimes too light for us to notice. . That movement, a matter of millimeters, causes the focus to deviate from the initially focused area.
This is normal because by choosing an f/1.4 aperture and a shallow depth of field, we are accepting that the focus area has to be millimetrically precise. We accept the fact that the subject is in sharp focus and that, just a few millimeters behind or in front of it, everything else is out of focus.
That focus point, which we had fixed on the subject, has moved a few millimeters. The subject has become part of the background. If before we had the precise focus placed on the eyes of the subject, at the moment of shooting our torso, arms and camera had moved a few millimeters backwards that, now, what is in focus of the subject is not the eyes but the nose. Curious photo, very focused nose and blurred eyes. Does it ring a bell? 😉
How do I fix this?
Stabilizing everything.
If you are going to shoot at wide apertures like f/1.4 (which I invite you to never stop doing, the results are worth it), then whenever you can try to use a tripod, or at least leave the camera on a table or a support that guarantees that the camera will not move once you have the focus taken.
If this sounds like overkill, give it a try the next time you shoot with a large aperture lens. Take the focus first, then move your torso slightly forwards or backwards and you will see the out of focus photo you will end up with. This is what you have to use this type of opening, the results and the focus are spectacular, but the focus becomes very sharp and requires constant precision from the moment of framing until the photo is taken. This can only be achieved by stabilizing the equipment, camera, lens, and even to be able to be the subject or object.
Nothing more, I hope that today’s trick has been useful to you. If you still do not have one of these objectives, be sure to take a look at the article that I mentioned.
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