Focus/No Focus
Part of the reason I like taking so many out-of-focus shots (only a fraction of which I ever post on flickr or here) is because very often, that’s how I see the world.
And I don’t mean figuratively; I mean literally. Every time I take off my glasses, trees disappear (forget individual leaves!), roads become a blur, and the sky is just a mass of blue or grey or white. I’ve worn glasses or contacts since I was about 12 for nearsightedness. My eyesight steadily worsened as I got older, and then I contracted an infection in my right cornea right after I came back from India in 2000. For almost a month, I was almost completely blind in my right eye. I spent hours at a specialist, and over the course of about two years, I regained most of my vision back in that eye – now both of my eyes are equally bad.
I guess that’s one of the reasons why I almost always trust the camera’s autofocus rather than rely on my own eyesight.
I took a couple of shots today and tried to mimic exactly what I see when I’m not wearing my glasses by manually-focusing my DA* 50-135.
This is what the actual scene looked like:
Looking in the other direction:
What I see:
The reality:
November 13th, 20091:34 am at
This just makes your ability to produce stunning macros just even more impressive!
November 13th, 20092:51 am at
Hi Keitha,
somehow my first thought was: your nickname should be “lensbaby” ;-)
Although I suffer from shortsightedness as well it is much less severe than in your case. Fortunately, it can’t stop your creativity :-)
Thanks for showing us the world seen through your eyes…
Jan
November 13th, 20097:14 am at
What a great exercise! I can tell I need new glasses because many of my manual-focus shots are pretty blurry once I can examine them close up on the computer. I rely heavily on the camera’s auto-focus, too.
November 15th, 20094:14 pm at
Hi Keitha,
This is very remarkable! It’s great to see your creativity in these photos, even in the OOF ones. Great work, I love it!