Our assignment this week was a technical one…back button focus (BBF). Most SLR cameras have two ways to focus; the first is pressing the shutter button half way down and the other is the ‘back button’ which is generally just to the left of your right thumb.
I could go on to explain it but this link explains it quite well! (I apologize to Nikon lovers, myself included, but Canon did a good job on this). Back Button Focus explained. This feature is on Nikon cameras as well. Take a peek at your manual to see whether it needs to be programmed or if it’s a default feature.
And here is my BBF experiment.
I set my single focus point on the cherry, because of course, that’s the most important and pressed my BBF button. I was shooting at f14 so a lot of the scene appears to be pretty focused but the background is not quite as sharp. I was bending down as close to the ground as I could without sitting down. But I don’t particularly like the composition. It’s a little too even. If I would have just tilted the camera up to capture more of the sky, there would have been a bit too much distortion for me (the buildings would appear to lean to the center even more than they do in the second photo). To get more of the sky in the photo would have required me to lay on the ground and it was very…soggy.
So because I had pressed the BBF before my first shot and didn’t touch it again, the focus was still locked at the exact distance to the cherry which would allow me to recompose without losing focus. Instead of laying on the ground, I just put my camera close to the ground, took my shot and I like the composition much more. The sky is more appealing than the soggy brown grass and the focus is exactly where I set it with my first shot.
