Focus {Week 9 of Selfie Saturdays}

 This is probably coming 8 weeks too late, and by now most of you have already figured out how to work with focus in a self portrait situation. However, for those who are new to this, this will make your life just a little bit easier.

The hardest thing about shooting self-portraits is the focus. You might have the concept, you have the model ( you ), and the location, proper framing can be done in post-processing, but how do you shoot without looking in the viewfinder?

The key to this is, of course, the right equipment. You are going to spend 10 x the amount of time on a self portrait if you are shooting without a remote. You will be limited to fewer locations if you don’t have a tripod.

EQUIPMENT:

If you’re serious about improving your skills as a photographer, about making sure that you have a few pictures of yourself alongside those millions of pictures of your kid and any inanimate object you can find, if you want your family to look at the pictures from the holidays and remember that you went with them, you NEED to buy a remote and a tripod. You will see how many more uses you’ll get out of those two accessories, beyond a simple self portrait: family photos, steady hand, goofing around with your kids, you and your hubby in the same shot together {OMG}, not having to be by the camera at all times.

NOTE: I take my tripod and remote ON ALL VACATIONS. Just in case.

Now before you rush to buy a remote, make sure it has two things:

It’s wireless
It has a 10 second option

The remote I have always used ( since I started self-portrait photography in 2008) is this one: Canon Wireless Remote Control RC1 for Canon XT/XTi, XSi, and T1i Digital SLR Cameras

Now probably for some of you I won’t be telling you anything you don’t know already, but if I can help one person take better more focused pictures, I am happy with that.

Shooting without a remote

{even if you’re a remote shooter, you might want to read this, because there will be times when you don’t have your remote with you, or you lose it or you simply have to resort to manual trigger, because the remote keeps focusing on the wrong things- it all happened to me more than once}

The key to shooting without a remote is knowing EXACTLY where you are going to be once the shutter is triggered. I am talking your FACE, specifically.

TIP: The easiest way to achieve sharp focus when you’re using the in-camera timer is to have stand-in, like you kids or you significant others, because you can give them direction. Position them where you need to be, focus on their face, hit the shutter button and ….beep…beep….beep… run to stand in the exact spot they were occupying. Let me demonstrate that for you:

TIP: If you don’t have a human stand-in, you can always use a chair or any other tall object. Actually, a second tripod works great since it can be set at any height.

Now, I have been shooting with a remote for a long time, so when I started to write this post, I was honestly rusty when it came to in-camera timer shooting. So to make it more close-to-reality, I decided to go out and shoot some selfies with one goal only- to see how well I do focusing without the convenience of a remote. In the end, I was very pleased with the results. S0 let me show you what I did.

 This was the very first shot I did, focusing on the branches and then positioning myself so that my face was inline with them. I circled in white where the focus was placed.

TIP:  I shot at f/2.8 which is a relatively difficult aperture to get the focus right. I could have gone to f/1.8 but even when shooting a standard photo, it’s sometimes hard to find the focus on that aperture. So I’d suggest you practice with a smaller aperture, until you’re comfortable enough with the focus to get it right  with something more challenging like f/2.8 and larger. You’re going to get more artistic pictures with better apertures, however an out-of-focus picture is no more appealing, whether it has a blurry background or not.

That was a pretty basic simple shot, so I decided to complicate it a bit. 

TIP: Hammocks are notoriously difficult when it comes to getting the focus right. You’re never sure where exactly to focus, they move constantly. It took me about 2 shots to get this one right. I focused right on the middle part of the hammock where I knew my face would be. Without taking my eyes off the spot where the focus is, I carefully lie down, keeping my feet directly on the ground, not letting the hammock move uncontrollably, until my body  in the horizontal position. Once I have my face where it needs to be and the hammock is still, I take my feet off the ground and put them on the hammock. Now ALL THIS HAPPENS in the 10 seconds that my camera timer goes “beep…   beep…   beep…”

Next challenge was shooting from the top. This was relatively easy. I found a patch of the grass that looked slightly different. I placed my focus on it, and ran to position myself with my eyes DIRECTLY over the spot. Not your shoulders, or your body, or your head.  EYES!

Next was shooting from below. Same trick: focused on a specific branch, positioned my face in line with it and voila! The problem was that when I would actually get to the branch, I’d get confused which one I focused on, since they all look alike. But out of about 10 photos, I got 4 perfectly in focus.

This is my favorite shot of the set. I made sure to get a lot of glare and sun into the shot and it worked out perfectly with the focus.
And isn’t that the goal? To take 20 pictures (or more like 50-100 if you’re new to self-portraiture) with the hopes that 1 of them will be gorgeous!

And finally,

TIP: If you have a really nice slightly off focus shot, you can always put it in a diptych with something even more out of focus to create an illusion of sharpness haha
Preferably something without you in it. Like out of focus trees, or flowers or whatever works for your shot.

The photo on the right looked significantly out of focus before I placed it next to the other one   (I didn’t have a blurry shot of the branches, though that would have worked even better}

TIP: Sometimes, we don’t have branches and trees and hammocks to focus on. Sometimes all we have is a blank wall. However focusing on that wall isn’t an option since your face is going to be on a different level with the wall. Those are the toughest shots, and what I do in this case is turn to manual focus. It looks pretty much like this:
focus on the wall
back up the focus just a bit
run to get the shot,
come back to check how out of focus it was
adjust the focus a bit further
run back to the wall to pose
now back to the camera to see if you got the focus right (nope, it’s a bit off)
change the focus slightly
run back to shoot
check the shot to see how close you’re getting to being in focus.

And this goes on and on, until you finally hit the spot, and now: “NOONE BREATHE!” You can take unlimited pictures in that spot as long as you don’t touch the focus. YAY!

Also instead of changing the focus bit by bit, you can always move yourself inch by inch until you got a shot that’s in focus. But the danger here is that you’ll forget where you’re supposed to stand, since you moved around a bit.

These shot were all taken using this method. It took me probably A WHOLE hour to take 20 good photos, including the focusing time and 50 out-of-focus trial photos.

Shooting with a remote

Shooting with a remote is pretty self-explanatory, so there’s only 1 tip I can give you.

TIP: The best way to get the right focus when shooting with a remote is to avoid reaching your hand out to trigger the shutter, like in the picture below. Instead, keep the remote at your body/face level.

 It doesn’t happen too often but once in a while the camera focuses on the remote itself (or somewhere in the middle), leaving you with a slightly or majorly out of focus shot. And since you’re using your remote to shoot, you tend to not check every picture, assuming it’s focused properly. I’ve had to redo quite a few shots after I found out that the camera managed to focus on my hand instead of my body. It doesn’t happen all the time, but the few times it does happen is enough to ruin your whole photo set.

If the camera is too far away and  it won’t trigger until you stretch your arm out, make sure you do it fast and try to keep the remote slightly lower that the camera while triggering it.

So that’s it for this week.

Our challenge this week will, of course, be focus related. This time again you’re free to take any self-portrait you want with 1 condition: BOKEH!

For those not up on the lingo, Bokeh is  the blur we get shooting at large apertures, specifically those beautiful light spots as a background that gather in clusters and give any photo a magical feel.

This should give you the practice of shooting with large apertures and learning to get the focus right. Make it pretty!

Example {the background that consists of those little balls of light} on the left side.

So Week 9 Selfie Saturdays: ANY Self-Portrait that involves BOKEH

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