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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Manual Focus Techniques Explored on Nikon D90


Today I declare a special day on my calendar - Manual Focus day. On this day, any photos I take must be taken on full manual mode, regardless. Since manual focus is something not many of us are keen in, you can say most of us are poorly trained to do it well anyway.

It actually involves a series of familiarization and even training before you can get away with handling a manual lens or shoot manual. No easy feat as I realized today. You can count it a small miracle when you actually take a tack-sharp image with this technique. And what better incentives than to do so with the legendary Zeiss 50mm F/1.4 Planar! No, I did not buy one.

But as it turns out, focusing soon became a nightmare even for the Zeiss specialist of the store. Out of twenty shots he took, none were proper. When it was my turn to shoot, nothing came out fine on 1/50, 1/60, 1/100 second! Hold on! We were all shooting at F/16! Metering was tuned to Spot metering as the Zeiss lens could not provide any metering information to the camera. Each shot now takes tens of seconds as opposed to split second to shoot.

Go on, laugh it out loud! I know its my first step but I am pretty determined to ultimately do this right.

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