How To Use Focal Points in Photography Composition

By Sarah Rodriguez-Martinez

Related course: Photography for Beginners

Focal points and composition are important in photography. They have a strong impact on the message we want to convey.
In this article, you will learn how to use focal points in photography to enhance your images.

What Does Focal Point Mean for Photography Composition

Doing a quick search you will find there are several meanings to the term ‘focus point’. I am going to focus on the one that refers to composition.
In this regard, focus points in art and photography are similar. It is the part of a work (or image) that draws the eye of the viewer, the center of attention in the image.
Choosing the right focus point is crucial. It has a big impact on how the viewer appreciates the image. It is what photographers use to tell the viewer, ‘Look here, this is what I want to show you!’.
If you don’t choose the focus point well, the viewer will get confused. They won’t get the message you want to convey.

There is a technical part related to the focus point. You need to know how to select a point with your camera and decide if you want to shoot in manual mode or in one of the autofocus modes.
This is an extensive subject. If you want to know more about it, I recommend you to look up a fundamental tutorial.
Once you have the technical part clear (with a bit of practice you totally will), you are going to face the big question. From all the possible focus points in a scene, where should I place mine?

Creating a Selective Focus in Your Images Using Depth of Field

An effective way to set the focus point on your subject is using a narrow depth of field. You achieve by focusing on the subject while having the rest of the elements in the image blurry.
This is based on the fact that the sharper part of the image attracts the viewer’s attention.
You can get this effect by setting your camera’s aperture wide (f4 or smaller should work). The wider the aperture you use (smaller f-number), the stronger the effect will be.
You will need to readjust the shutter speed and/or the ISO to get the correct exposure for the scene. It works even better if your subject is farther away from the background.

The important thing here is to choose your subject well. It is easy to mislead the viewer to the wrong point of the scene.
Before pressing the shutter release it is worth to stop one moment and think where to place your focus point.

Focus Point Placement for Stronger Compositions

The position of your subject in the frame also plays a huge role in determining the focus point. To get stronger images, try to follow some composition guidelines.
One can be the Rule of Thirds. Don’t place the point of interest in the center of the frame. Place it in either the grids or the intersections of a 3×3 grid instead.

You can also use leading lines. Compose the image in a way that a line ends at the point of interest. The viewer will follow the line until it reaches the subject you want to show.
This requires a bit of observation of the environment and searching for lines. With time and practice, it gets easier. You can use the lines made by a street, a railway or even a wall.

Sometimes the easiest way to draw attention to your subject is by simplifying the scene’s composition. Try to remove any distractions by creating a lot of negative space around the subject.
The most common way to get negative space is using an empty (or almost empty) area. It can be the sky, a wall, grass, water surface, etc.
Your subject will look defined and will stand out!

Use Light Contrast to Highlight the Focus Point

Eyes are drawn to bright things. Placing the focus point in the brighter zones is a great way to ensure your viewer will see it as the most important part of the scene.
When taking the photo, search around you for areas with strong light contrast and place your subject there. This type of contrast is easier to find when the light is hard.
This happens when the sun is high in the sky (late morning and midday) when light is coming through an opening such a window or with a directed artificial light (such as a light post in the night).
You can use strong light contrast to emphasize your focus point. And to hide distracting elements by hiding them in the dark areas of the scene.

The light helps to drive our attention to the biker instead than to the people around him.

Use Color Contrast to Emphasise Your Focal Point

Color has a huge role, not just in setting the mood of an image, but also to set the focus point of the scene. Color contrast might be a bit more subtle than light contrast. Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t come easy.
With some practice you will get used to search for color combinations. The easier situation is to have a scene with just two colors. One acts as background and the other as your focus point.

This man was outstanding thanks to the contrast of his red jacket with the blues and browns 

of the landscape.

An easy way to practice this at home is with fruits. Place a red apple in-between a lot of yellow ones or a strawberry in-between kiwi slices.
In these examples, the red color of the fruits will stand out in the background and will act as a focus point.
Once you get used to 2 color combinations you can experiment with more. A single warm color will be the focus point among cold colors and the other way around.

Choose Elements With High Visual Weight as Your Focus Point

It is important to keep in mind when composing an image that there are elements that naturally have a higher visual weight than others.
They will attract the viewer’s attention much more than other elements in the scene. That’s why they make great focus points.
One of these elements are human figures. We tend to look first at a human than a tree, a house or even an animal. Our eyes are also attracted by large elements or objects with text.

In this image, I wanted to show the Harbor, so I framed the scene to make the ship look 

bigger than the Opera building.

Knowing this is useful both for using these elements as focal points and for avoiding them if they are not!
If you are taking a portrait you might consider telling your model not to wear clothes with writing. This will keep the clothes from becoming the focus point instead!
Texture also adds visual weight. Smooth areas will be lighter than the ones with a lot of texture. Even orientation has a role. Diagonal lines have more visual weight than straight lines.
You can use diagonal lines to emphasize your subject. But remember that they can be distracting if they are not the main subject. Look at an image with a tilted horizon and you will see as this takes all your attention.

Set the Eyes as Your Focus Point for Stronger Portraits

Eyes are so expressive that we naturally look at them in every person we meet. The same happens in a portrait. Eyes are strong focus points.
Try to keep them as sharp as possible. The viewer can get frustrated looking at a portrait with blurry eyes.
There is an exception though when you want to emphasize other parts of the body. Then you have to make this other focus point really stand out. In this case, you can even crop the eyes out of the image.

Focus on the eyes also when you take animal portraits.

When you have a group portrait the eyes are not playing such a crucial role. They are usually a small part of the frame. With groups make sure everybody is sharp.
If somebody appears blurry the viewer will understand it as ‘less important’. You don’t want anybody to get offended! Use narrow apertures, such as f/11 to keep everybody in focus.

Widen the Focus Area to Get Sharp Landscapes

Landscape photographers don’t use wide apertures (selective focus) to compose their images. They want a big area of the scene sharp to show the viewer the whole picture.
They use small apertures (high f values) and what is called hyperfocal distance. This distance establishes where the particular point to place the focus to get the biggest area in focus or greatest depth of field is.
In this case, you will get images with a sharp foreground and background. This distance depends on many factors such as the focal length, the aperture or even your camera sensor size.
There is a formula to calculate it every time you want to shoot. Luckily we don´t need to do any math anymore or check complicated charts because there are online resources and apps that do the work for us. One of them is Dofmaster.

Compose a Strong Image With Multiple Focal Points by Establishing a Hierarchy

What if you have more than one focus point in a scene? There are a lot of cases where you will find more than one interesting subject in your image.
This is quite common in street photography, where you have a lot of elements in a frame. It is possible to compose a strong image with multiple focus points. In this case, you need to define which one is your main focus point and make sure to establish a hierarchy of interesting elements.
Give more visual weight to the main point than to the others with one of the techniques in this article: light contrast, color, position in the frame, etc.
This will be the point that attracts the viewer’s eye first. The other focus points will guide him through the image.

The first we see in this image is the model and then her pink shoes. These were also important 

because they are part of her image brand.

Selecting the right focus point and enhancing it with the composition of the image will strengthen the message you want to convey to the viewer. How you do it will affect any shot you are taking.
At first, it might take you some time to think about the position of the focus point in the frame, light or color contrast or the visual weight.
After some practice, you will get used to these principles and you will improve the quality of your work.

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How to Shoot Creative Reflections in Drinks (All In-Camera!)

By Dina Belenko

Related course: Wow Factor Photography

The light that is sliding on the surface of tea or coffee looks mesmerizing and dreamy all by itself. But we can add something even more fantastic to drink photos. We can use it to tell a small, cozy story using reflections, an in-camera effect.
It’s highly versatile and super simple. And it’s a great way to step up your food photography game. So, let’s get started!

The large variety of stories you can tell with this simple creative trick is hard to overestimate

Make a Sketch

First of all, think about the story you want to tell. The reflection you’re going to make doesn’t have to be complicated, but it has to be connected to the whole scene.
I think the best way to come up with an idea for a shot like this is to think about your character. This is your hero.

You don’t have to know how to draw in order to make a sketch. My sketches are very primitive, 

but still extremely helpful

Is it a child who wants to be an archaeologist? Put a dinosaur reflection in a cup and add a fern near it.
Or a reader obsessed with fairy tales? Let’s make a still life with a book and a ghostly dragon.
A traveler, who wants to fly all around the world? Good, let’s make an airplane reflection in their cup!
Catch your character’s thoughts and make a reflection silhouette from them. In my case, it was a botanist, who founds a rare carnivorous plant.

What Gear Do You Need

1. Source of Soft Light

To make a creative reflection in a coffee cup the most important thing we need is a large source of soft light.
It can be a softbox or a big diffuser. Or you can use window light, passed through a white cloth. This get rid of the reflection of objects in the street.

If you prefer shooting with natural light, find a place where you can get a soft shining reflection .

in your cup that looks like this

It is much easier to work with a constant source of light. You’ll be able to see the shape of the reflection immediately.
If you’re used to working with speedlights like I am, you won’t have any issues either.

Template and Props

To make a template for our reflection we need a sheet of thick paper and a layout knife (more about that later). And surely we need a cup of tea or coffee and some additional items to match your story.
If you have a reflection of a sea horse, stick to sea-themed props, pick a blue ceramic cup, add a hand-drawn treasure map, some sand and a couple of seashells.
In my case, the predatory plant silhouette works with moss, fallen leaves, and some mushrooms.

Camera and a Tripod

And last, but not least, you will need a camera with any lens suitable for still life photography. I favor 105 mm. You will also need a tripod to free your hands and concentrate on composition.

Make a Template

Cut a form of reflection you want to get from paper. It’s best to use simple forms for the first try (stars, heart, airplane). You can try more complicated forms later (a tree branch, octopus or even letters).

Use templates like these to get light figures шт your cups

Decide, do you want a dark silhouette or a shiny figure. I wanted my predatory plant to be a light spot inside a cup. So I didn’t need the figure itself, but a cutout of it in the paper.
The same goes for shots with an airplane and the dragon, here I use a sheet of paper with a hole in it.
For a shot with a blackbird, I used the silhouette itself to get a dark shadow on a bright reflection. Pick whichever you like best!

Or use paper silhouettes themselves (not holes they leave in the paper) to get dark figures like this blackbird

Use thick paper for your templates, surprisingly, it will be much easier to cut (it won’t tear or 

get crumpled up)

Make templates with patterns and use them multiple times

The size of your cutout should be about the size of the reflection you want to get. If the diameter of your cup is 8 cm, the cutout should be about 6 cm.
The whole template should be about 12, to cover all the space that should remain dark.
Use a layout knife or small scissors and very thick paper to make the template. This way it can hold its own weight and it will be easier to hold it in the air.

Arrange Your Composition

Put your camera on a tripod, choose the angle that makes you able to see the surface of a liquid. After that arrange a composition with a cup and objects related to your reflection.

I decided to focus on the reflection and keep everything simple

In my case, it’s some mushrooms I made from polymer clay and fixed with paper clips. I also added some moss and fallen leaves I always keep on hand.

Set the Lights

You can use any lighting scheme you like. You need to have a soft light right above your cup, so it could make a bright spot on the surface of the coffee.
If you have only one light source, a big reflector above the cup will also do the trick.

Make sure you can see a nice light reflection

Most of the time I use two light sources. The key light is a speedlight behind a big diffuser. I placed this behind and slightly above my scene.
It provides beautiful shining reflections and is crucial to getting the creative reflection in-camera.
The fill light is a speedlight in a small strip-box on the left side of the scene. It lifts the shadows slightly and creates more volume.

You can fix the template steadily with a clamp or simply hold it in your hand.

Here’s a key light on the right side. It gives strong shadows I found quite suitable for an image with a space theme. Fill light is on the top. It provides a reflection

Try to not shoot from the side of a light source. If your only light is above the scene don’t place your camera above the scene too.
Unless you want to get a flat image without shadows that show the volume of objects. Add another source of light on the side or move your camera lower.

Frontal light kills all the shadows and makes the image look flat

You can play with light, making it go through glass bottles. This way you can get beautiful flares

How to Focus for Sharp Reflections

You can adjust the sharpness of the edges of your reflection in two ways. First, you can move the template further or closer to a cup.
The closer you are to a cup, the sharper reflection you get. I prefer slightly blurred edges. You may want them to be strongly blurred or extremely sharp.

Find the balance between the sharpness of the reflection and the objects around the cup

Second, you can change the focus of your camera, sliding between blurred object and sharper reflection or vice versa.
It’s mostly a matter of taste. Don’t make the edges of your reflection too blurred, so the viewer can recognize the shape.

Take a Shot

Put the list of paper with a cut figure between the source of soft light and the cup. This way you can see a silhouette in the reflection.

I’m using Wimberley Plamp II PP-200 to keep my template in place, but holding it with your hand in perfectly fine too

Set the focus mode to manual. Autofocus may decide that it prefers reflections to an entire scene and focus on it. This leaves your still life in a blur and keeps you from combining two shots afterward.
Take control of this and focus manually.

With the right size template, this effect should work completely in-camera, but sometimes reality ensures and you can get your hand in the frame. For these cases, there is always Photoshop, where you can use Layer Mask and a soft brush and in two minutes get a perfect image you wanted!

The image during the shooting…

… and at post-processing

Most of the time this trick works in-camera. Sometimes, the right size of reflection comes with your hand or an edge of a sheet of paper in the frame.
In that case, capture two shots and combine them later. Using a tripod makes it very simple even you’re not experienced in post-processing.
Last quick suggestion. You can make your background wet and it will shine just like the surface of tea under the soft light!

I poured some water on my background, so I could get a reflection on it too. And later I decided 

to sprinkle it with water, so I got some pretty raindrops

If you need to get rid of paper that got in the frame, combine a shot with a reflection and a shot with a clear background using Layer Mask.
Hopefully, you got the effect in-camera and all that remains is to adjust the tones and enjoy the finished picture.

Final image with a predatory plant!

Here are some more examples of what you can do with this technique:

Create more intricate and complicated silhouettes

Find and interesting theme

Create a reflection outside the cup

I believe this trick is as versatile as it is fun to try. I can’t wait to see all the stories you come up with! Best of luck with your experiments!

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Easy Guide to Understanding Camera Resolution

By Karthika Gupta

Related course: Photography for Beginners

The latest trend among most camera manufacturers is to increase camera resolution. Some full-frame cameras on the market have already reached 61 megapixels. Medium format cameras are even pushing beyond 80 MP.
But gear lust aside, how much resolution do you really need from a camera? Do you need the Sony 7R IV at 61MP or the Pentax 645Z at 51.4MP? Or will you be happy with the Canon Rebel, a very popular entry-level camera, at 6.3MP?
Here’s our easy guide to understanding camera resolution so you can answer these questions and more yourself.

[Note: ExpertPhotography is supported by readers. Product links on ExpertPhotography are referral links. If you use one of these and buy something, we make a little bit of money. Need more info? See how it all works here.]

What Is Camera Resolution?

In general, digital camera resolution is measured in megapixels (MP). One megapixel is actually made of one million pixels or dots. These pixels are what store data about the image.
If your camera is slated to capture 6.3-megapixel images, that is around 6,300,000 pixels per image (6.3 x 1,000,000).
But this pixel information tells you nothing about the actual pixel dimensions of your image. It only tells you the total number of pixels that comprise the image.
The general rule is that the higher the megapixels number, the higher the camera resolution. This can mean better quality of the photograph.
When you are buying a digital camera, resolution can be one of the most important things to take into account, second to your budget.

How Does Camera Resolution Affect Image Print Size?

In short, yes. The higher the camera resolution, the larger the potential print size. When printing digital images, most photographers and print professionals will look for a certain number of dots per inch (DPI).
A high-quality print with good details should be anywhere between 150DPI to about 300 DPI. The actual size of the print is calculated by taking image width and height and dividing it by the DPI number.
The math might seem a bit complicated but bear with me. Most digital cameras across the board are set to capture images with an aspect ratio of 1:5 by default. In my Canon 5D MK III, I can change the aspect ratio using the menu settings in-camera. But 1.5, or 3:2, is the default.
Medium format cameras and large format cameras or even film cameras will have different aspect ratios as default.
This means that the ratio of the number of pixels along the longer edge of the image to the shorter edge is 3:2. Each full-size raw image that the camera generates is 4672 x 3104 pixels in dimension.
Multiply those two dimensions and you get the actual number of pixels in an image, approx. 14.6 MP.
You can use photo editing software to check the image height and width for your specific camera. If you are using Lightroom, you can find image dimensions in the Library module. Check under the Metadata section.
If you want to print a 4×6 image at 300 DPI, then you need a file an image that is at least 1200×1800 pixels in size. To get this number, multiply 4×300 (pixels along the short side) and 6×300 (pixels along the long side).
For an 8×10 image at 300 PPI, the result is 2,400×3,000 pixels.
What all this math does is affect your choice in new cameras. You should base this on the most common image size you’re going to print.
If you never or rarely print your images, you might not need a camera with a very high resolution.

How Does Resolution Impact Image Cropping?

In general, the higher the camera resolution, the more room there is to crop your image. Most of us try to avoid cropping images in post-production.
Sometimes, this is necessary to give focus to the desired subject. It can be the case if your subject is far away and you don’t have enough zoom on your lens.
This is also true for wildlife and sports photography. You might not be able to get close enough to the subject to isolate it.
Cropping is a good way to get rid of all the surrounding distractions and isolate the subject.

An image taken with my iPhone 7 but cropped down to focus on the people in the image 

shows how grainy and unclear the image is.

An image taken with my Canon 5D MKIII – cropped down to focus on me, is not as bad as 

the cell phone image cropped but is still not very clear.

Cropping reduces the resolution. This is why wildlife and/or sports photographers tend to want as much resolution as possible.
More often than not, they opt for high-end cameras with high resolutions.

Higher Resolution Doesn’t Always Mean Better Images

It is important to note that a camera’s sensor size is not the same as the camera’s image resolution. Without getting too technical, a camera’s sensor captures light through small pixels and turns them into a digital signal.
The Canon Powershot is a point and shoot camera from Canon that has an image output of 20.1MP. Whereas the entry-level Canon Rebel T6 DSLR is at 18.6MP. A point and shoot can have a higher megapixel than a DSLR but completely different sensor size.
The sensor size controls the actual size of the pixels themselves. That’s the important part. Most point and shoot cameras have smaller sensors and that means smaller pixel sizes.
This is why higher resolution doesn’t always mean a better camera. A more advanced camera with a larger sensor and lower megapixels will be better than a point-and-shoot with higher resolution.
A smaller sensor cannot capture as much light. The images it produces will have less dynamic range and more noise at higher ISOs.

Poor Quality Lenses Perform Worse on High-Resolution Cameras

There is a reason why photographers covet glass more than the latest and greatest cameras. A camera is just a box without the right type of lens.
You cannot have a camera with a high megapixel count attached to a lens with poor quality. The quality of the lens provides data for each pixel on the sensor.
You cannot compare a small sensor camera with a bad quality lens to a full-frame DSLR and a high-end lens.
Another issue that some cameras have is with diffraction. This is amplified with smaller sensors that have diffractions at larger apertures. Diffraction will reduce sharpness and affect resolution.
Poor quality lenses do worse on cameras with higher resolutions.
A lens might do quite well on an entry-level Canon Rebel of 6.3 MP. But it might fail to perform optimally on a Canon 5D MKIII 22.3MP camera. You’d be losing most of the benefits of a high-resolution camera in the first place.
In such cases, you might be better off not upgrading to a higher resolution camera at all.

Professional quality glass – an L series lens will always produce sharper results compared 

to a standard/kit lens. It just depends on the output that fits your needs.

Stick With a Lower Resolution Camera If You’re Just Starting Out With Photography

Another important factor to consider when deciding to upgrade your camera is your skill level.
Are you at a point where a higher resolution camera is going to make a world of difference? Is gear the only thing holding you back? I don’t mean this in a derogatory way but in a very practical sense.
You might have the best of the best gear in terms of cameras and lenses. And you can still end up with poorly executed images that lack details or use bad lighting.
High-resolution cameras amplify everything. This can be camera shake because of poor camera holding stance or shutter vibrations at really low light. It can be bad focusing techniques, or even using poor quality tripods.

This image is from a client shoot in 2013. I had the best glass and camera I could afford at that time – Canon 5D MKII and 24-70MM f/2.8 which I still use today.
But at 1/15th of a second handheld and at 2.8 wide open, the image is blurry when zoomed in and not the best.

Can You Take Print-Worthy Images With Your High-Resolution Smartphone?

These days everyone wants a smartphone that can take amazing looking photos.
I had an inquiry the other day where a mom was shopping for a photographer for her child’s 16th birthday party. When I told her my rate, she texted back saying it was outside her budget.
She said she would rely on her cell phone to take print-worthy photos.
I have to admit there was a part of me that cringed when I heard that. Cell phone photos, no matter how great, cannot always produce print-worth images.
This happens because of some of the very reasons we have already discussed, like print size and sensor size.

These two images are of the same area – one on a cell phone and the other via DSLR. Can 

you tell which is which? Left is iPhone 10 and right is Canon 5d MKIII

Not all cell phones have poor photo-taking abilities. In fact, the latest version of iPhones improved upon the 2018 version of iPhone XS and XS Max. It adds an ultra-wide lens and front and back cameras for selfies.
The new iPhone 11 is supposed to have two high quality back cameras as well as features like slow-mo selfies! But good photos aren’t always about the hardware or the gear.
On the Android side, Pixel 3 is still a strong contender.
With cellphone images, the quality is also affected depending on what type of editing you do on the image. If you add a lot of filters and effects, any grain due to low resolution will be more pronounced.
In general, try and keep editing simple for both mobile photos as well as DSLR images. Also, zoom the cell phone image after you have taken the picture. Don’t use the digital zoom when you are clicking a photo.
A cell phone image several hundred yards away will look grainy and blurry. It doesn’t matter how good of a photographer you are.
Here is a quick rundown of popular cell phones and their megapixel capabilities:

• Nokia Lumia 1020 at 41MP
• OnePlus 5 offers a dual-camera set up with 16MP and 20MP sensors
• Sony Xperia XZ Premium at 19MP
• Google Pixel 3 at 12.2MP
• iPhone X at 12MP

While 12MP is standard in most cell phones, these go above and beyond. They provide higher megapixels for customers who want to do more with their images.
Doing more might not always mean printing cell phone images on huge billboards. If you have seen the iPhone pro shots across the country, you might be tempted to print your own cell phones images to a large size.
In general, keep in mind things like light, colors, processing, and subjects when printing cell phone images.

If you do decide to upgrade to a camera with a much higher resolution, make sure it is for the right reasons and for the right outcomes. Perfect your craft, learn the limits of your existing gear, optimize your lens by understanding that lens sweet spot.
If you don’t, you might be wasting the potential of your existing camera gear. And upgrading to a higher camera resolution might be a very expensive mistake in the long run.

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What Is Focus Peaking? (And How to Use It in Photography!)

By Gabor Holtzer

Are you often wondering how cool it would be to use a great vintage lens on your modern camera? But you’re put down by the lack of autofocus?
Don’t be. There is an easy solution that makes manual focus easy as a pie. It’s called focus peaking.

What Is Focus Peaking?

Focus peaking is a camera technology that helps you focus during manual focusing. It shows a false-colour overlay on the sharp areas of your image in real-time.
Until recently, it was a tool of videographers, as not many consumer cameras had it. Nowadays it’s built into most new cameras, and there are ways to enable it on older camera models as well.

How Does Focus Peaking Work?

The algorithm analyses the live image feed in almost little to no lag. When something is in focus, the sharp edges create a strong exposure difference in that particular area of the image.
So, focus peaking is looking for areas with high contrast, especially micro-contrast.
Then, it covers those areas with a false-colour layer.
In most cameras, you can set the colour of the overlay, and change the sensitivity of the detection.

focus peaking on a Panasonic GH5

How to Set Up Focus Peaking

To enable it, go to the menu of your camera. You will find it the focus settings panel.
For the best results, set the overlay colour to complement your scene. That way, it won’t blend in and you can see it clearly.
The sensitivity setting determines how much of the image is considered to be in focus. The higher you set it, the wider depth of field it will overlay.
So, use low sensitivity with wider DOF, and higher sensitivity with shallow DOF lenses.

How to Use Focus Peaking for Best Results

Focus peaking allows you to focus much quicker with manual lenses than the traditional live view magnification method.
However, with shallow depth of field, it still can be challenging to focus. You can combine the two methods to get sharpness slightly faster.

When Not to Use It

While it can be very useful, there are some cases when we don’t recommend using focus peaking.
If you’re shooting a scene with camera lenses that have an incredibly shallow depth of field (ie. a 50mm f/1.2 on full-frame), don’t use it.
When the area of focus is so shallow that even the best algorithms can’t show the sharpest areas accurately. If you have that issue, use the slower, but slightly more accurate live view magnification technique for focusing your scene.

Which Cameras Have Focus Peaking?

Basically, any MILC (Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera)  that has been released in the past 5 years, has focus peaking built-in.
Some older models from Sony, Fujifilm, and Panasonic also have focus peaking.
Focus peaking is also included in most new DSLRs from Nikon, Sony, and Pentax, but it can only be used in live-view.
Canon DSLRs don’t feature focus peaking at all. You can only use focus peaking on cameras with Magic Lantern. ML is third-party software that extends Canon cameras’ features.
The problem is that Magic Lantern is not yet developed for many of Canon’s newest DSLRs. That includes the 1DX series, the 5D MkIV, the 7D MkII, the 80D and 90D, and all of their newer entry-level devices.

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How to Achieve Cinematic Motion Blur Photography With the 180 Degree Rule

By Craig Hull

Related course: Milky Way Mastery

This article will look at what we call the 180 Degree rule, and why we use this for time-lapses and hyper-lapses.

What Is Motion Blur

Motion blur is linked to the shutter speed of any given photograph of any given scene. Imagine you want to capture a sports match, and you want to freeze the subjects, as not to show any blur.
You would use a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second.
This number can go higher for faster moving subjects. The distance the moving object is from your camera also plays a role. Closer subjects moving at a medium speed will seem faster than a faster subject farther away from your camera.
Now imagine you want to photograph the same sports match, but you want to capture that sense of movement. You would drop the shutter speed to something lower, such as 1/125th of a second.
Each subject and its relative speed will need different shutter speeds.
Consider the below image as our example.
The first pinwheel has a shutter speed of 1/10th of a second. The abundance of motion blur stops us from seeing the subject as it is.
The second has a shutter speed of 1/50th of a second and is a little more pleasing to the eye. We can tell what it is, and we have a good amount of motion blur.
The third pinwheel has a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second, and only presents a minute amount of motion blur.
The fourth has a shutter speed of 1/800th of a second and has no blur at all. In fact, it looks still.

Cinematic motion blur is all about how much motion blur is enough. It disregards the settings that give us not enough and too much respectively.
Here, the 1/50th of a second shutter speed is perfect.
You need to understand that every situation will be different.

Shutter Speed vs. Shutter Angle

There are two areas present in the capturing of motion blur. One is the shutter speed, and the other is the shutter angle.
You might not have heard of shutter angle before. It’s an old filmmaking term. Since time-lapses create videos, it will be important to know.
We know about the shutter speed. It is how long your shutter stays open to record the scene. Well lit areas require the shutter to stay open for a shorter period of time. Low light areas require the shutter to stay open for longer periods.
These are of course offset by the other camera settings. And whether you want to achieve specific results, such as motion blur through what we know of as a long exposure.
The shutter angle comes down to the size of the shutter. In former times, when every motion picture used film, there had to be a shutter mechanism.
This shutter mechanism allowed the reel of film to move to the next frame. All without becoming exposed.
In photography, the shutter closes and reopens with every shot. Even the most advanced mirrorless models have a limit of about 14 frames a second.
In filmmaking, scenes were usually captured at rates of 24, 25, and 50 frames a second.
The film plane stayed open. But a film mechanism covered the frame for the next exposure without it becoming overexposed. See the GIF below for a better understanding.

180 Degree Rule

There are no shutter angles higher than 180°. A film camera has got to have that time to move the film down for the next exposure.
You can, of course, go to smaller angles, such as 90° (1/96s for 24fps), but these are used for specific situations.
We keep the 180° angle because it feels more natural to the human eye.

Choosing the Right Shutter Angle

When it comes to making our time-lapse video, we already know the end result is a succession of still images. You need to take each image separately.
We need to think about the shutter speed for each frame. And find one that will give us a realistic video once stitched together.
At 1/50th of a second, moving objects will be blurry and unusable in a time-lapse. But, if you set these to play at 25fps, it looks natural.
Unlike still photography, a video without blur can look odd to the viewers. This is because the human eye does see the motion blur.
Looking at our pinwheel again:

Here, we are capturing three pinwheels, all at 25fps. The shutter speeds are different.
The first has a shutter speed of 1/25th of a second (360°), the second has 1/50th (180°) and the third has 1/500th (20°). The 180° pinwheel captured at 1/50th is more natural than the others.

Applying the 180 Degree Rule to Time-Lapse Photography

So we know that the 180 Degree rule allows us to capture images that are the most natural to the human eye. But how do we put this into practice with time-lapse photography?
When we photograph a scene for a time-lapse video, we talk about intervals. This is a setting that we use to decide how many frames per second we want to capture. Using a 2-second interval will give you 0.5 fps
To keep the 180 Degree rule, we need to think about the shutter speed. The simplified version is the frame interval, in our case two,  divided by two (as 180 is half of 360). This gives us (2 / 2 = 1) a shutter speed of 1 second.
There is a problem with intervals in time-lapse photography. Set your interval for two seconds, and your shutter speed for one second. The overall interval time will become 3 seconds.
The camera starts counting the interval after it takes a photograph. Not when the last interval ends.
Shorter times are not as affected as longer exposure times. That’s where the above calculation becomes further and further out of whack.

All in all, the one-second exposure will not give us the 180 Degree rule. You may get a nice image, but it’s not what we are after. To make it true, the interval needs to be one-second, just like the exposure.

The 180 Degree rule provides us with a realistic touch to our time-lapse images. And to our videos.
You can, of course, shoot at different shutter speeds and shutter angles. These will provide you with different effects.
Each scene is different. Perhaps you tried the cinematic blur and decided it’s not for you. This isn’t a rule as in you need to follow it, but rather a guideline for creating pleasing images.
You can even use this rule for single images, to give them extra flair.

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