Swans near Tiengemeten

[olly]

OM-D E-M5 175 mm f7.1 1/400 iso 200

[IMG] P9140104a by Rob OM-D, on Flickr[/IMG]

[chauncey]

Robert, I googled your gear, it seems very adequate in reviews but it would appear that the AF is "back focusing" and leaving your subject somewhat soft. There are a lot of methods to check the problem.

[Wavelength]

Excellent; how bout a vertical crop avoiding unwanted background scenes?
Regards

[Geoff F]

Your focus with this shot seems much better to me.

1/400 is rather slow for a flying bird though, even with slower wing beats like swans I would like to have at least 1/800. Increasing the Iso to 400 might risk a bit of background noise but I think it would have been worth doing.

A different crop is certainly worth trying; although a vertical crop with 4 x 5 ratio does risk looking a little too cramped.

[Brownbear]

Beautiful capture.

[Inkanyezi]

Robert, I googled your gear, it seems very adequate in reviews but it would appear that the AF is "back focusing" and leaving your subject somewhat soft. There are a lot of methods to check the problem.

Huh? Us EVIL shooters don't have "back focusing". ;-)

[Dusty]

Robert, I googled your gear, it seems very adequate in reviews but it would appear that the AF is "back focusing" and leaving your subject somewhat soft. There are a lot of methods to check the problem.

The AF is "back focusing" you say wm, on this side of the pond, back focusing is when you use the "AF-ON" button on the back of your DSLR to back focus instead of half depressing the shutter button to focus. I don't think the subjects are soft because of this but the use of 175mm focal length, not sure what lens he was using.
If I was going to crop this I would crop the bottom swan out and crop more of the back of the swans and try and take out that building by either crop od cloning it out and leave the birds to fly out of the image. It could do with a bit more contrast for me.
A good effort.
Dave.

[Inkanyezi]

There seems to be a bit of confusion here. "Back focus" is a term mostly applied to a "phase detection" AF system misaligned, so that focus lands behind the subject. Most EVIL cameras, and particularly the OM-D, focus on the image chip and therefore need no calibration to adjust a separate focusing device to align with the image sensor.

"Back button focusing" is another thing, often mentioned as "thumb focusing", referring to the method of using the AF feature of the camera.
http://improvephotography.com/4552/b...tton-focusing/

The OM-D cannot "back focus" according to the first paragraph, as it has no misalignment between the focusing device and the image chip. It focuses directly on the image chip, the sensor that takes the picture.

There are of course other ways to throw off focus, but I think the birds in the image are in focus, and the background is not.

[GeorgeM]

Focus looks good on my monitor. A nice shot.