Infinity Focus?

Posts: 870 - Karma: 8,777

Apr 15 2014 1:00PM

a lot of times when I shoot photos of sports, particularly skiing, I like to use infinity focus. I was just wondering if you guys use this at all or do you focus on the spot you want, then shoot the action?

I like my results, but another photographer at my mountain said that he has never shot in infinity focus.

Thoughts?

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eheath

Posts: 61186 - Karma: 119,190

Apr 15 2014 1:11PM

infinite focus is for shooting stars basically, youre not shooting into infinity when you shoot anything on earth.

I have noticed that for a nice deep focus, a tad before infinite is the most sharp. If im shooting on a tripod say a jump, ill use my expanded focus and look at the lip and setting my focus to 14m (or similar, depending on how far away you are) is always sharper than infinite.

Id suggest shooting two photos of the same thing, one at infinite and one a tad below and do some 200% crops, you'll notice the difference

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cydwhit

Posts: 5065 - Karma: 42,823

Apr 15 2014 1:13PM

Like just set the focus to infinity? yeah I do that when I'm shooting fisheye or astro-stuff but otherwise I auto-focus for a rough idea of where to be and then fine tune manually, depending on the light/aperture/angle my focus is at infinity sometimes but I wouldn't say I "infinity focus"

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T-Sin

Posts: 870 - Karma: 8,777

Apr 15 2014 1:40PM

Yeah I shoot Infinity for stars and such as well. I do use regular manual focus for sports shots as well, I was just doing the infinity, to see what it looked like and it actually looked decent. But now I see the difference!

Thanks Guys!

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Laurent.

Posts: 10054 - Karma: 25,277

Apr 15 2014 2:16PM

Cool kids use the hyperfocal distance.

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p.hawks

Posts: 2832 - Karma: 581

Apr 15 2014 2:21PM