Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/11/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:48 AM 11/4/00 -0500, gbicket wrote: >Morning! > ><snip> > >Now as long as we're considering the remote possibility of photographer >error, let me jump to confess that after lots of trying with the 80mm R, I >could never consistently put the focus plane where I wanted it. Some rolls >would come back with hilariously misplaced planes of focus. One by one >revealing that while there was indeed a razor sharp focus plane, and >beaucoup bokeh, often nowhere near I intended it. I got it right between a >third and half the time! There were even shots that turned out interesting, >but fully unintentional in terms of what I had attempted to do. >Compliments about the unintended focus plane in a particular photograph made >it worse! > ><snip> > >Enjoy the light. > >Greg > Greg's post is a great post. Everyone should read it in it's entirety. Not just this snip. What Greg has outlined is exactly why AUTOFOCUS camera/lenses are useful for only a very limited and select set of conditions. Like bright sun, ISO 400, f/8-f/22. Weddings, flat walls with graffiti, etc. Autofocus algorithms look for vertical or horizontal (whichever your camera maker has provided) contrast lines. Since you, the human, who are looking at the ground glass screen, know what it is that you want in focus, how can a computer program written by a programmer, sitting in a cubicle somewhere, know what you want to focus on? They cannot, the camera can't, and even you the human, will sometimes have trouble. This, to me, is why autofocus is useless to the photographer-artist, commercial/illustrative photographer, amateurs who want to control what gets put on the film, etc. Autofocus is great for weddings, journalism, county fairs, happy snaps, vacations, and all of the times when you can live with where, on the subject, the focus program focuses your lens. Jim