Photography

Last year I took a semester of photography and one of the things my teacher would always comment on was how my images were out of focus about 97% of the time. I'm not sure why this was, I mean focusing an image isn't that hard right? So I decided this is something I should probably work on, as it's a pretty essential part of photography.

I learned a little focus trick on my own while at a One Direction concert. My photos from that show all came out blurry and it wasn't until the very last song that I saw the girl in front of me tap her screen and it focused the image to the lighting, apparently it doesn't always automatically focused and for some reason I thought it did.This comes in handy with all the lights flashing at the camera, and I took this tricked and used it at other concerts and to photograph other things as well. This trick might sound insignificant and lame but it really helped my concert pictures go from a blurry, ugly mess, to something more in focus and cool looking, as you can see in the following. #1 is before I used this trick and #2 is after.

"Focusing about one-third of the way into the image will give you the widest possible range of focus throughout the image" (Kelby 139). In other words, if you focus the image one-third of the way from the edge you can get more of the scene you are trying to shoot into focus. However, if you'd like to achieve that cool effect where only the subject in the center is in focus then forget about the one-third trick and focus directly in the center of the image (Kelby 140). I tried doing an image with just the center in focus for photography class and it totally failed so I'd recommend either not doing that one or practicing it a lot as I can be pretty tricky.

Question: What is the hardest part of photography for you and why?