The Unexpected Behaviour of Focus

One thing that arrived to me after some time of using the OP7 lens.

Focusing became easier.

That seems backwards.

After all, close-up photography is famous for its paper-thin depth of field. I expected focusing to become more demanding, not less.

Instead, I found myself missing focus less often than when photographing something a few meters away.

It took a while to understand why.

The lens doesn’t only bring subjects closer.

It quietly changes the behaviour of focus itself.

Without the close-focus lens, the camera’s focusing system spans everything from nearby subjects to the horizon. The focus ring and autofocus motor have to cover an enormous range of possible distances and subject matter.

With the close-focus lens attached, that entire journey becomes concentrated into the small space where the subjects actually are.

(On Fujifilm X100VI the OP7 working distance is just 12cm to 20cm from sensor plane or starts from 5cm in front of the lens.)

Instead of searching from here to infinity, the camera is only deciding between “slightly closer” and “slightly farther.”

The focus hasn’t become more precise.

The world available to focus has become smaller.

I noticed something else.

When focus arrives, it arrives unmistakably.

Tiny hairs appear.

Textures suddenly become crisp.

The background melts away.

There is much less ambiguity about where focus is.

Perhaps that is why autofocus also seems more confident. It has fewer places to search and a much clearer signal telling it when it has arrived.

I hadn’t expected a close-up lens to change the experience of focusing.

I thought it would change magnification and add a bit of hurdle.

Instead, (and over time) it changed the relationship between the camera and distance.

A tool that doesn’t add complexity or performance - it reshapes the relationship so that what’s already there becomes easier to notice and engage with.

I soon stopped using AF-S focus-lock-and-recompose.

At these close distances, the act of recomposing is also an act of refocusing. A movement too small to notice is large enough to shift the plane of focus.

Continuous autofocus (AF-C) , on the other hand, quietly compensates for those tiny movements. It isn't correcting the lens as much as it is correcting me.

That leaves a little more attention available for composition - for the background to settle, for a highlight to drift into place, or to notice there was another visitor on the leaf all along.

^^^ Image taken with Ricoh GR IIIx and OP7 (using GA-2 49mm filter adapter for convenience)

In. Out. Return. (Slightly changed.)