Focus

I am borrowing a very nice camera for work.  I’ll be returning to my regular (broken, fuzzy, cell phone) camera tomorrow, so I thought I’d grab the chance to explore how manual focus works.  These are pictures from my Sunday morning walk.

That last image is the best of dozens of shots.  I thought the yellow flowers against the blue fence was absolutely beautiful, but I just couldn’t get the camera to see what my eyes were seeing.  Perhaps there’s a technique I don’t know that would have helped me, or perhaps the lens itself was just wrong for this image.

Regardless, this has given me a real appreciation for my own eyes.  A brief exploration reveals that both eyes and cameras make use of refraction, a phenomenon I somehow managed to know very little about until a month or so ago when my friend Avi explained it in the context of how sound travels in water. Our eyes focus by expanding and contracting the ciliary muscle, which in turn changes the shape of the eye’s lens, flattening it or making it rounder. This creates a longer or shorter focal length.  You can achieve the same thing in a more direct manner with your camera, by manually changing the focal length.  The longer the focal length, the further away you can focus.  (I think.  Readers who know more about optics/eyes/photography, feel free to correct or add to this explanation!) Just as an object can be too close to your camera to ever be in focus, you can bring your hand too close to your eyes to see in focus.

I’d love to keep this camera, and continue exploring.  Sadly I can’t, but I’m not going to focus on it.  :p