Focus

Pity the poor UFO watchers of days gone by, with their bulky cameras and most distressingly manual focus. It's hard enough to spot a saucer in the sky, but to also keep it in clear focus was a daunting task.

I suspect that today's sky-watchers are thrilled with modern camcorders, if for no other reason than the inclusion of automatic focus control. Thanks to millions of calculations processed while shooting, a camcorder can do an amazing job of keeping objects in focus. Sometimes, however, the camera performs its job too well.

Automatic focus versus manual focus

Digital camcorders use automatic focus by default. Although they include some sort of manual focus control (which is often a small dial that's hard to adjust in the middle of shooting), most likely it's not the type of focus ring found on your 35mm still camera. Nonetheless, don't be tempted to let automatic focus dominate your shots.

Auto focus tends to focus everything in view, causing footage to appear hyper-real at times (Figure 2.8). Your eyes don't bring everything into focus as you look around, so video that is predominantly focused can be distracting.

Figure 2.8. Camcorders do a good job of focusing sometimes too good. In this shot, Greta is competing with the chair and the firepit in the background for the viewer's attention.

In an ironic twist, automatic focus can actually contribute to blurry images. The camera generally attempts to focus the objects in the foreground (which may appear on the periphery of the image and not be immediately visible to you), but that can throw off the focus in the rest of the shot and leave your subjects blurry (Figure 2.9).

Figure 2.9. Objects in the foreground can throw off your camcorder's automatic focus.

If your camera is mostly stationary, experiment with manual focus to make sure the objects you want to be in focus remain in focus.