posted by admin on Improve your skills

5 comments

Have you felt frustrated that your tracking of moving objects is not often very accurate? Trust me, you are not alone and many photographers, especially hobbyists, give up in frustration and wait for stationary objects instead. But not all is hopeless. Focusing on a moving target is just practice and can be perfected. We have compiled a list of ten exercises to help you practice. These exercises range from simple and easy to advanced and hard.

Now that our equipment is set, let’s do some exercises.

1. The slow tracker: Get a relative or your spouse to sit in front of your camera and tilt their upper body from left to right, slowly. Focus on their inner eye corner, since its the highest contrast in the face, and follow the movement. Take 10 frames and get 2 in focus and pin sharp. repeat until you get close to 50% (5 photos) sharp. Notice how on each photo the background has motion blur?

2. The cyclist face: This exercise is almost purely a pan exercise. You will learn how to move (pan) with the speed of a certain object in order to obtain a sharp image while the background stays blurry. Take focus on the face of any bicycler outside and take shots as he or she rides by you. Make sure you ask first or explain to them what you are doing in a calm manner later on. You could also always ask a relative instead.

3. The slow car exercise: This is fairly simple, just as the cyclists face. Take focus on a car driving by your house at a slow speed. Focus on the front door handle and keep in focus. Take shots so that the entire car is in focus, bonus points if you get the car in focus but the wheels in motion blur.

4. The fast car exercise: This one is a bit more difficult. Get close to a speedway or highway or any street that has a faster speed limit than 30km/h. Take focus again on the door handle and take sharp shots of the cars as they drive by. Again bonus points if you get the wheels to be motion blurred

5. The bird exercise: One of the more challenging exercises is to capture birds in flight, continuously. Everyone gets a shot of a bird in flight with a fast enough shutter speed. The trick is to capture a bird with slower shutter speed, in focus with motion blurred background. Focus on the head for best results.

6. The falling leave: this exercise is mainly doable in autumn. Stand by a tree that is dropping its leaves and as you see them falling, focus and take photos with the leaves in focus. This is a very challenging exercise and very advanced as you need to tilt up and down and pan as well as be fast in focusing.

7. The ball game: Ask two of your relatives or friends to throw a ball to each other and follow the ball, focus and take pictures in flight. A trickier version of the exercise is doing it with a frisbee or a small ball.

8. Playing children: This exercise is closely related to the shooting kids article. While I mentioned in the other article to let the kids play and take shots in their own environment, it takes a LOT of practice to do so. You need to be fast and quick to focus with children. Do this when you have practiced for a while already with all the other exercises. Bonus if you get great shots without EVER to tell the kids to look at the camera. This also can be done at an outdoor sports event for example. I say outdoor because you will need a long lens for sports and long FAST lenses are expensive, so we stay indoors and assume you have access to more consumer oriented lenses.

9. The soap bubble exercise: This is a very advanced exercise and one that most people struggle with. Focus on a soap bubble and get a shot, close up in focus of the bubble. The tricky part is that a) bubbles are transparent so you need to focus on the edge for your camera to catch on and b) bubbles are so light that any breeze just throws them around in the air. This involves good skill to capture as you need to pan and tilt quickly.

10.The Advanced Soap bubble: This exercise causes more frustration than anything else. It basically is the exact same exercise as above but in windy weather. I would wager 9.9 out of 10 shots you will miss.

As these exercises are all challenging please remember to have fun while doing them and if you don’t get the shot done right away, don’t give up, just continue. Eventually you get it and when you do, your photography will become much better from a technique perspective.

Tags: autofocus, bubble, exercise, focus, photography