My inability to take a picture in manual focus caught up with me at the most inopportune time.
At the end of October, a rare rhinoceros hornbill – believed to be extinct in Singapore since the last wild bird was spotted about 200 years ago – appeared in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. It seems move there since people reported seeing it almost daily. I went there a couple of weeks ago.
The hornbill was deep in dense woods. With helps from fellow bird watchers, we could only see it through small openings in the leafy branches.
Using auto focus, I couldn’t see it through my high power lens! But I could see it with my naked eyes, though not very clearly. I asked a bird watcher, who got clear bird image of the bird on his camera. He said he used manual option to focus on the hornbill through the foreground.
He told me what to do, and after a few tries, I finally saw the bird on my camera for only one time, and could not repeat the magic 😞.
I decided to learn manual focus. With the help of Google and YouTube, I finally learned how to change aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and select different options of focus.
To mock the real world scenario, I put a baseball cap behind an artificial tree at home, and tried to focus on the cap.
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| focus was on foreground |
Despite the lessons taken, I still could not focus on the cap. It turned out that even when I selected manual, the focus is not automatically set at manual focus. What I need to do is to use auto focus first to zoom in on the cap, then change the focus to manual, fine tune the focus. I finally could focus on the cap consistently.
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| focus was on the intended object. foreground was a blur |
There are a lot to learn to take good pictures using manual focus. I made a good first step. Hopefully I will take a good photo of the rhinoceros hornbill wherever it is in the woods at SungeiBulohWetland.
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| Rhinoceros Hornbill at Sungei Buloh (from newspaper report) |
Note:
Auto focus makes taking pictures easy, and 90% + of time I can take good photos. In fact, early this year, I took a perfect photo of a blue tailed bee eater.
