Workflow variations

Today I decided to live without autofocus. I started in the company in the morning, and I was particularly interested in how this manual focusing would work together with face- and/or even nearest eye detection.

Well, using face detection works pretty well. The camera recognizes the person in the photo, and if you have focus assist switched on, the image in the viewfinder will be zoomed in up to 14x as soon as you move the focus ring. It will jump back and show you the whole picture if you don’t turn it for a moment, or if you half-press the shutter. With real manual lenses you’ll have to zoom in yourself, otherwise it’s the same. Without face detection turned on, you’ll have to move the focus point yourself first – on my little “Pen” camera I could even do this with a tap onto its rear display.

So it’s pretty easy to focus on eye lashes for instance. This isn’t sharpened at all (I rarely do that since a while):

7de_8015015-zuleikha

Zuleikha, August 2014. Olympus E-PL5 with Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm/1.4 at f/1.4, manually focused through the VF-2 viewfinder.

It’s fun to leave the automatics behind, and it makes you stop and think a little bit more before pressing that shutter.

Thanks for reading.