AF FINE-TUNING NIKON LENSES — bWedding Photographer Northern Ireland/b
Recently I noticed that the images I have been taking have not been as sharp as they could be, I was having to add a lot of sharpening post-production. After looking at photographs taken by another wedding photographer in Northern Ireland straight out of camera using the same equipment I realised I was not getting the best out of my cameras and lenses.
The problem was a minor one but enough to annoy me, so after a bit of research I needed to customise the focusing of my lenses to my camera. What I was unaware of is that all lenses and camera bodies are different and need to be calibrated together to get them to focus perfectly. Camera manufacturers set them up to work generically but the tolerances between lenses and cameras can be quite large and need adjusting. It is especially critical if you use lenses wide open at f1.2-f2.8, if you have sharp images at these apertures and have not calibrated your lenses to your camera, you are one of the lucky ones.
I borrowed a Lens Align from another very kind wedding photographer (who will remain nameless to protect him from every photographer in Northern Ireland phoning him to borrow the Lens Align) who I knew used a lot of prime lenses and had similar issues. Every single one of the seven professional lenses I use was front focusing, some by over half an inch. Basically this means that all of my images were slighty out of focus, if they were back focusing at least some part of the image would have been sharp !
Below is an example of a very minor front focusing lens issue I had, notice the number 4 at the front being a lot sharper than the 4 on the the other side of the zero line. (It is the 85mm shot at f1.4.) The sharpest part of the image was in front of the zero line, I have now adjusted it to be slighty behind the the line. This gives me a better chance of getting images sharp wide open.
