Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/160 sec at ƒ/4, ISO 100
Images zoomed in to 100%, with minimal editing and no sharpness applied.

The Canon 24-105 was one of the first lenses I purchased when I upgraded to the Canon 7D last year. I’d heard mixed reviews about the auto-focus with that particular lens, but a friend of mine uses it all the time and would consistently get really sharp images. So when I noticed I wasn’t really getting sharp images (especially when compared to my crazy tack-sharp Canon 70-200 ƒ/4L IS lens) I was beginning to get disappointed.

At first I thought that maybe I was somehow introducing camera shake when I was hand-holding the photos, or I wasn’t nailing the eyes (or wherever I wanted the focus point to be) so most of the time I just thought it was me. But after I was continially getting soft images and also after doing a recent food shoot with my camera on a tripod with the IS turned off I noticed that the images were still not sharp so I  could rule out human-error as a contributing factor. I know this lens has the potential to create sharp images at f/4 (which is where the aperture on my camera is usually set) so I thought it would be a good idea to test out the micro-adjustment feature on the 7D.

I enlisted my friend’s help to go through this process and he suggested we photograph our eyes to do the testing since it’s something we photograph regularly and are used to looking at on the computer. We positioned a mono-light to my left (those are my creepy-looking eyes in the photo above) and set the lights to 1/160 sec at f/4. Then we started by going into the camera’s “Custom Functions” tab and found the “AF Microadjustment” menu item. We moved the micro-adjustment incrementally until we found the most in-focus correction (it ended up being +9 on my camera). The image on the left is what my camera was defaulted to, and the image on the right is the corrected version and sharpest focus I can get with that lens.

I don’t really know the mechanics of what AF micro-adjusting on the camera does … I guess the best explanation is that it’s similar to the “exposure compensation” feature, but for focusing. All I know is that I now have much more in-focus shots because of those 20 minutes of testing.

Now, you might be looking at the above images and think that I’m crazy to even care about the sharpness of the image on the left. It’s really not too bad, but I do my best to get very clean images and work on my images at 100% most of the time and focus is one of the most important technical aspects of my images when I’m deciding which ones to “keep” and edit. Another thing to understand is that changing the micro-adjustment makes it so that what I’m focusing on is the part that will be in-focus. When the focus was off it wasn’t just soft all-over, the focus plane was in the wrong spot (like I would focus on the eye and the nose would be in-focus instead). With my line of work my images have to be as close to technically perfect as possible and having accurate focus is extremely important.

It’s official … my new book, Canon 7D: From Snapshots to Great Shots, is shipping! It’s available direct from Peachpit.com now, and should hit the other online stores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders) next week. :)

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/125 sec at ƒ/4, ISO 100

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm ƒ/1.4, 1/80 sec at ƒ1.6, ISO 100

Here’s another image from the iStock event over the weekend. This was photographed in a mortuary … it was the last set of the day and I was running low on ideas. I thought a simple portrait would be nice to do and I really like how this one turned out.

Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/160 sec at ƒ/5.6, ISO 100

Canon 7D, Lensbaby Composer, Double-Glass Optic, 1/125 sec at ƒ/5.6, ISO 100

This is a photo from this weekend’s iStock photo event organized by Todd and Renee Keith (http://www.bellaora.com). I had a fantastic time and got some really amazing images from the event and will be posting more images from it throughout the week.

One thing I did during the event was I challeneged myself as much as possible. On the first day of the event (Friday) at the SLC Library I only shot with my 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens. The next day I did all but one set with my Lensbaby Composer, and yesterday I used my 70-200mm ƒ/4L IS lens for all but one location (one room was just too small to use that focal length).

Of all of the lenses I used the Lensbaby-day was the most challenging, since it’s tough to get perfect focus on every shot but one thing about that lens is that when it is focused it’s CRAZY sharp. It was also dark in the room and we were using studio lights for nearly every shot, so that of course made it even more difficult, but I really like the results I got and can’t wait to get them all edited. :)

The last few days I’ve posted photos from a food shoot I did, and I thought I’d share some tips on how I styled it.

When you make yourself a sandwich at home they don’t usually look all poofy and airy, they usually end up flattened with all the ingredients mushed together. Well, I wanted my sandwich to look like all of the ingredients were stacked up beautifully, and wanted those nice little curls to the deli meat, so I did more than just place all the pieces on top of each other.

In order to keep the sandwich from being flat and saggy I cut small pieces of cardboard and layered them as-needed in-between the elements. I put one under and on-top of the lettuce, and then I used tooth-pick halves to pin the bunched-up deli meat in place. The toothpicks also helped to add bulk and hold up the tomatoes, which were placed (along with the top piece of bread) directly on the deli meat.