{"id":16823,"date":"2021-04-17T15:42:24","date_gmt":"2021-04-17T20:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/?p=16823"},"modified":"2021-08-13T14:09:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T19:09:30","slug":"a-vanishing-skill-manually-focusing-a-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/2021\/04\/17\/a-vanishing-skill-manually-focusing-a-lens\/","title":{"rendered":"A Vanishing Skill: Manually Focusing a Lens"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>
A tiger swallowtail butterfly harvests nectar from blossoms on one of my cherry trees recently.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I possess an increasingly rare skill: being able to focus a manual-focus lens.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s autofocus-saturated world, this skill is particularly hard for younger photographers to appreciate. The truth is that for the first 20 years of my career, I neither had autofocus, nor did I need it. And to this day, I have several extraordinary manual focus lenses that I can manually focus swiftly and precisely.\u00a0I bring them out once in a while to keep my game and my eye fresh.<\/p>\n

I would urge anyone getting into digital SLR or mirrorless photography to learn to manually focus. There are times when you can\u2019t convince a camera\u2019s autofocus system to focus where you want, and there may be times when you use non-autofocus cameras. It\u2019s a valuable skill.<\/p>\n

Last summer I bought a Fujifilm X-T10 mirrorless camera specifically to breathe new life into all manner of older manual-focus lenses, and that has been very rewarding.<\/p>\n

I recently photographed some tiger swallowtail butterflies harvesting my cherry trees. The lens I had with me was my newest acquisition, the Nikkor 50-135mm f\/3.5 AIs Nikkor of early 1980s vintage. Manual-focus zoom lenses are harder to focus than prime (non-zoom) lenses, since they tend to have smaller maximum apertures (thus, less-bright appearance in the viewfinder), and the focus throw (the amount you need to turn the focus ring) tends to be longer to accommodate different zoom settings.<\/p>\n

Honestly, the challenge of focusing like I did in 1988 adds a layer of stress to shooting, but it also feels like the task is awaking and retraining my old skill.<\/p>\n

Finally, my young friend Mac borrowed my blooming cherry trees for a photo shoot recently, and she shot digital and film, the film camera being an Olympus of 1980s, pre-autofocus vintage. She expressed a definite liking for the old camera and the technique required to focus it.<\/p>\n

\"Mackenzee<\/a>
Mackenzee Crosby makes pictures in my orchard last week, moving freely from an autofocus digital camera to a manual focus film camera.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I possess an increasingly rare skill: being able to focus a manual-focus lens. In today\u2019s autofocus-saturated world, this skill is particularly hard for younger photographers to appreciate. The truth is that for the first 20 years of my career, I neither had autofocus, nor did I need it. And to this day, I have several…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,21,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-ideas","category-lenses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16823"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16995,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16823\/revisions\/16995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/cameras\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}