In the previous blog, I talked about the space we found for our family when we moved onto a rural property. The children had more space inside the house and plenty of room to play outside, not that you would know it from the photo of the three older ones squeezed inside the rabbit hutch. It is still a mystery how they got in and out.
Photos like this can be problematic for modern cameras that tempt users to rely on autofocus. Any autofocus system you can find will want to focus on the wire in this pic, not on the faces. To get a really sharp pic, you would have to turn off the autofocus and manually focus on the faces.
You can trick the autofocus (if you have it set to a single point) by pre-focusing the camera on a point that is a bit further away than the wire, such as the end of the hutch handle at the top left. By pre-focusing, I mean half-press the shutter with the focus point on the handle. Then reframe and take the photo. You need spatial awareness, because you need to pick a pre-focus point that is the same distance away from the camera as your intended subject. With practice, you can do that quickly enough, but it’s not precise.
With manual focus, which was the only option on my film SLR, you could be precise, and perhaps faster than the trick I described above. You just had to decide where to look in the viewfinder and focus accordingly, usually on the subject’s eyes.
I mentioned previously that my photo output was dropping because I was focused on the family and our property. Another reason showed up in 1994: my camera was ageing. By now, it was probably 20 years old. Every now and then, I would get photos back like this. At first, I thought the processors were messing up my pics. However, eventually I figured out that the light traps on the back of the camera were leaking light into the camera body when I gripped the camera on one side. Sometime later, I got around the problem by making sure that I kept the base piece of a semi-hard case attached to the camera body, which stopped accidental distortion of the camera back.
I looked into replacing the camera body, but, as I recall, at that time Olympus seemed to have abandoned the mid-range market and only sold high-end models for more than I could afford. I could have changed to another brand and bought a cheaper camera, but I would have had to buy new lenses as well. So long as the camera kept working, I stuck with it. As it turned out, there was still a long way to go before I would upgrade my gear.