Great bokeh and tack sharp focus: Don’t let a shallow depth of field ruin your focus

 

 

Shooting at f/1.4 or a similarly fast aperture is a lot of fun. You get awesome bokeh, gorgeous out of focus areas and a lot of interesting depth to your images. However, it can be very tricky to nail your focus. The margin for error is very thin. Portrait photographer Manny Ortiz has three techniques for helping you get perfect focus even when you are shooting at very wide apertures.

Ortiz's go-to autofocus method is to use his camera's eye autofocus. Ortiz shoots with Sony cameras, but many other cameras include eye autofocus technology, even if it's exclusive to live view shooting. If your camera doesn't include eye autofocus, then you will want to use your camera's more capable autofocus points. Sometimes outer autofocus points aren't as consistent or fast with focus, so utilize your center autofocus point and then lock focus and recompose. To see the rest of Manny's tips, check out his video below. For more content like this, head over to his YouTube channel.

(Via Manny Ortiz)