by Daniel Chiam
Today I brought Lady D for a walk in the woods to help me with my manual focus practice. I seldom use a manual lens before this and most of the time everything was on autofocus. Recently, I just got my Nikon 50mm f1.8 Series E lens and now I rarely switch it with an autofocus lens anymore. I fell madly in love with the vintage lens and I am determine to stick with vintage lens for as long as I possibly could. The downside for beginners like me, often we find it hard to get the right focus when using a manual lens. Especially the one with big aperture, which often made us desire for that bokeh shots. Go wide open all the way they say...
The truth is, the wider the opening the harder it is to get your subject in focus manually. Before this I always open my lens the widest possible, so that more lights can come in, faster shutter speed and less shaky hands effect. I even took most of my landscape photos that way, which was totally a major disaster. I later realized that with wider aperture, the less details you'll have in your photos and that is not something you want for a landscape photo, and I repented since. Nowadays I'm very confident with my camera setting and the reason why I always chimping is because I'm worried with my focus. I find it very difficult to get the right focus with the manual lens but I'm too stubborn to give up perfecting it.
Anyway, today's practice I learnt that you don't necessarily have to go wide open all the time to get that bokeh shots (depends on how much you want your subject to be in focus). I dialed down my aperture a bit and was really happy with all my shots. I need an average of 3 shots to get the right focus. Plus, it will be easier once you have fine tune you diopmeter, so that your eyes could correctly see how much of your subject are in focus and how much will it actually be in focus in the photo, once you have taken that shot. I'm quite happy with my practice results today and the fact that all of it only required effortless post-processing, I can't wait to see if the same can be achieve with live model.
