Better Focusing in Live View?

[AshleyP2]

I am a photography beginner. I got my Canon 60D to take pictures of my child, who is now 6 months old. I am having a REALLY hard time photographing her indoors. I'm sure it's operator error, but about 90% of my photos come out blurry. I know the BASICS of ISO, etc and I almost always use the viewfinder when shooting. Today I noticed that when I switched to Live View mode, I got the sharpest image than the previous 30 I had just taken with the viewfinder. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong, if I should get my camera checked out, and (or) what are some of your best tips/settings for shooting a {MOVING} 6 month-old indoors?
First image, IMG_1779, is taken with the viewfinder. Almost ALL of my images come out with this quality. Second image, IMG_1781, was taken and focused with Live View mode.

Thanks so much in advance! I've been researching photography tips and tutorials for the past 4 hours... I will be grateful for any advice you can offer!

 

[Solarflare]

Err, do you shoot with manual focus ?

I tried manual on my D5100, but its a luck based guessing game. I heard full frame cameras are much better at it.

I have no issues with focussing indoors, but then again I'm using a different camera than yours.


P.s.: Oh, and thats a very cute baby !

 

[DiskoJoe]

Err, do you shoot with manual focus ?

I tried manual on my D5100, but its a luck based guessing game. I heard full frame cameras are much better at it.

I have no issues with focussing indoors, but then again I'm using a different camera than yours.


P.s.: Oh, and thats a very cute baby !

Its not luck based. Photography has a lot of science involve. Proper aperture and shutter speed setting coupled with correct focusing give you a good exposure. Now framing is another story. Any camera with manual setting can do this and you do not need a FF.

 

[JG_Coleman]

What sort of shutter speeds are you using?

At least one major possibility here is that your shutter speeds are too slow indoors, in which case the blurriness has nothing at all to do with your focusing. To get a rudimentary idea of whether or not your shutter speeds are in the right ballpark, use your focal length as the denominator in a fraction, where the numerator is 1. So if your shooting at 50mm, your minimum shutter speed will be somewhere around 1/50 sec. This rule is only a VERY basic guideline... the steadiness of your hands, rate of movement of your subject, and little tech tools like vibration reduction can all have an affect on the ideal shutter speed for a given situation. You mentioned photographing a "moving" 6-month-old indoors... well, depending upon how fast he/she is moving, that can require a much faster shutter speed of between 1/150 sec (at the absolute least) to as much as between 1/300 sec to 1/500 sec. The classic shutter-speed recommendation for stopping motion in sports photography, for example, is to keep the shutter speed at 1/500 sec. This is a good guideline, but the actual shutter speed required to stop motion can be slower in circumstances where the movement is not so fast-paced as in football or baseball.

In my experience, there's no reason that Live View focusing should be noticeably more or less accurate than focusing through the viewfinder. There may be a difference in the speed at which your camera will focus using these two methods, but the accuracy is pretty much equivalent in most circumstances. So personally, if I were trying to troubleshoot this problem, I'd abandon that idea pretty quickly.

Given the info you've provided, I'm really tempted to think that your shutter speeds are just too slow and that, in one way or another, you're simply handling the camera differently when focusing in Live View, which is compensating to a certain extent. Now, admittedly, that may not be the case. But, I would say that you should first take a look at your shutter speeds. See if the meet the criteria above and get back to us here on the forum.

 

[Solarflare]

When I focus, I dont need science, I need to see with my eyes. There is no way to compute the focus because I cannot enter any number anywhere anyway. Would need to get a Leica or something like that for that.

And I fail to see what aperture etc have to do with focus.

 

[JG_Coleman]

When I focus, I dont need science, I need to see with my eyes. There is no way to compute the focus because I cannot enter any number anywhere anyway.

True enough, though it doesn't matter how accurate your focus is if your using inappropriate shutter speeds for relatively shaky, hand-held shooting... your shots will still come out blurry even if the subject was tack-sharp in the viewfinder.

And I fail to see what aperture etc have to do with focus.

Something like aperture can potentially have an effect. For example, using ISO 200 with an aperture of f/22 for a hand-held shot in moderate indoor lighting will produce blurry photographs every time... regardless of whether or not your focus is dead-on.

On the other hand, in your defense, I'm not sure if I'd consider the proper use of aperture/ISO/shutter speed to be "science". I'd be more apt to call it mathematics, perhaps... but even that's a stretch, because the fundamentals of manipulating these factors can be mastered by people that weren't exactly straight-A students in math class. Its just technique, really. And technique is everything when it comes to capturing photographs with acceptable sharpness, proper focus, depth-of-field, exposure, etc.

 

[pgriz]

There are a bunch of possibilities. Let's go through a few.

Is your diopter adjustment on the viewfinder accurate? That is regulated by the little wheel on the side of the viewfinder. See pg. (39) in the manual.

Indoors, you generally have low light conditions. So to get enough light you can open up your aperture to f/4.0 or wider, use a slow shutter speed (1/30 sec or so, but you may have hand-shake), and/or increase your ISO to 800 or 1600 (at the cost of some noise in the image). However, opening up the aperture will also decrease your depth-of-field, making focusing errors really obvious. A slow shutter speed lets in more light, but also shows any camera movement and/or subject movement.

If your lack of sharpness was NOT due to handshake (ie, too slow a shutter speed), then the next suspect is your auto-focus setting. You can either let the camera select the focus (it has 9 AF points), and it usually selects to focus on the nearest object if you have the auto-AF selection enabled. If you want to control that, you can select the center AF point (see pg. 78 in the manual) which is the most sensitive, and use that to acquire your focus. However, the AF mechanism needs enough light and subject contrast to be able to find the right focus. So the camera may still have difficulty acquiring focus if its too dim.

The main benefit of live-view, in my opinion, is that it gives you a bigger screen to use to see your subject. For critical focusing situations, you'd want to use a tripod and use the live-view magnifier. Obviously, if you are chasing a moving child, then a tripod is not workable.

 

[xjoewhitex]

For this exact reason I have gone to using live view 100% of the time. Im not sure why, I tried everything I could to figure out why my camera was missing focus so much and never did figure out why. I switched to live view and I haven't had a problem since. The focus is a bit slower, but its accurate. Focusing from the vf and lv use different methods, one based on color and the other based on contrast I do believe.

 

[Helen B]

Live view works stopped down as far as I have seen, while the reflex view through a viewfinder is usually with the lens wide open. This means that any focus shift that occurs when stopping down (quite common with fast lenses, even Leica ones) is taken care of. It's not always important, but it certainly can be in critical situations.

 

[JG_Coleman]

Well, I still don't think that any of us can really come up with any suitable explanation of why LV focusing would be noticeably more accurate than VF focusing in ordinary shooting situations. Before we go digging deep for ad hoc explanations as to why LV focusing might be more accurate than VF focusing, we should consider the very real possibility that that's a faulty conclusion in this case. There could be many common technique problems that account for the OPs problem.

You're definitely correct Helen that LV on many cameras focuses with the lens stopped down... and "focus shift" is a known issue to be contended with at times... but the OPs problem truly doesn't seem like a "critical situation" where that would apply. In the realm of general everyday shooting, I really can't think of any common reason why LV focusing should be noticeably more accurate than VF focusing on a camera.

I would think that the OP, in order to have the best shot at solving his problem, should at least start out by troubleshooting this scenario with the assumption that LV and VF focusing are equal in accuracy. If all of the more basic troubleshooting turns up nothing, then maybe it'd be worthwhile to delve into more uncommon or situation-specific possibilities.

 

[HL45]

OP, are you holding the camera differently with Live View than you do looking through the viewfinder?
Also can you post the exif data for each shot?

 

[mjhoward]

If you are using AF in both cases, it could be that the lens is back or front focusing and needs micro adjusted. When you arn't shooting in Live View, the Phase Detect AF Module is being used. This is different from the contrast detect method used during live view. If the lens has a tendency to front or back focus normally, it will not matter during contrast AF.

 

[bratkinson]

Like the OP, I have not had any great success with LiveView on my 60D. Tripod mounted, manual focus, works great! Auto focus, on or off a tripod...fuzzy pix...and that was with stationary items I was putting on ebay.

Did I mention LV is slower auto-focusing, probably due to Phase Detect focusing. And that's with f2.8 L lenses!

So I gave up on LV. I even disabled it on one of the menu screens. Otherwise, I'd accidently hit the LV button and lose 2-3 seconds to get things back to normal again.

 

[TCampbell]

"Live view" uses a completely different focus system. When shooting through the viewfinder, the camera's reflex mirror bounces some light into the AF focusing array. The array using "phase detection" to focus the image. When you use "live view" the reflex mirror swings out of the image path. That means there's no way it can bounce some light into the AF sensor array to perform phase detection focusing. Instead the camera switches to "contrast detection" focusing (which works just like a point & shoot).

This is both good and bad news. The bad news is that contrast detection is slower. It takes longer for the computer to analyze the image, search for 'edges' and then test the focus along those edges in an attempt to maximize the contrast between adjacent pixels along the edge. Shooting performance (the complaint of nearly every point & shoot camera owner who is trying to photograph young kids) goes down. BUT... accuracy actually goes UP. Contrast detection focus systems don't require calibration. Even though phase detection is considered to be a better system (when it's calibrated and working correctly), contrast detection systems are always able to focus at least as accurately as phase detection... and better if the phase detection is out of calibration.

Before you get worried that you have a camera with poor calibration (which is extremely rare), keep in mind that calibration doesn't have to be perfect... it just has to be reasonably close so that any error would be within the acceptable "depth of field" being used by the camera. There are the occasional bad copies of camera that need to be re-calibrated (you'd have to send both the camera and lens in to Canon for service -- this isn't something you can do yourself on a 60D).

HOWEVER... It may not be that your camera's AF sensors are out of calibration... it may be that your camera was selecting an AF point that you didn't intend. This is MUCH more likely to be the case. The 60D has 9 "cross type" AF points. By default the camera gets to choose which AF point it will use to achieve focus. You may override and force the camera to use a specific point (and you should in these cases). If you let the camera auto-decide, it will choose whichever AF point is able to achieve focus lock at the NEAREST DISTANCE. If you unload a photo straight out of the camera and post it (do not process it... do not even import it into any software other than maybe the Canon DPP) then I'd be able to tell you what the camera actually used as a focus point (the camera embeds some hidden data in the image file that tells you which focus points it used.) If the focus point wasn't on your child's eyes, then that would explain why the images appear a bit out of focus.

There's a button in the extreme upper-right corner of the back of the camera (closest to where the neck strap attaches) with a white pattern of dots in the shape of a "+", that button allows you to set the AF point. Press the button, then roll either the front wheel or back dial and you'll notice that the camera highlights each focus point as you roll through them. Press the button again (or half-press the shutter button OR press the "set" button on the back) and it'll lock into your choice. That will now become the only point where the camera attempts to focus. If you keep rolling through all each point, the camera will eventually light up ALL the points (meaning it's back to auto-select mode).

BTW... there's a shortcut since rolling through each focus point can take a while when you're in a hurry. Within the rear dial there's a disk (surrounding the "set" button) that you can press -- it's sort of like a joystick. You can press it up, down, left, right, or even the diagonals. If you press the right side of the disk then the camera will pick the focus point to the right. If you press the top then it'll pick the focus point at the top. etc. If you press the "set" button it'll pick the center point. Press it again and it'll toggle back to light up all the points.

 

[mjhoward]

This is both good and bad news. The bad news is that contrast detection is slower. It takes longer for the computer to analyze the image, search for 'edges' and then test the focus along those edges in an attempt to maximize the contrast between adjacent pixels along the edge. Shooting performance (the complaint of nearly every point & shoot camera owner who is trying to photograph young kids) goes down. BUT... accuracy actually goes UP. Contrast detection focus systems don't require calibration. Even though phase detection is considered to be a better system (when it's calibrated and working correctly), contrast detection systems are always able to focus at least as accurately as phase detection... and better if the phase detection is out of calibration.

You're very close, but this isn't quite right TCampbell. Contrast detection AF can be as accurate as phase detection AF but rarely is when motion is involved. The Contrast Detect system is dumb. It doesn't find edges or anything like that, it simply measures the contrast between adjacent pixels along the line or cross known as the focus point or points, which is usually as simple as a summation of the differences in RGB values between each. Once it has a measurement, it will either focus the lens forward or backward and take another measurement of contrast. If the value has gone up, the camera will make another step in that direction and take another measurement. If the measurement has gone down, the lens has focused in the wrong direction so it will begin focusing in the opposite direction. This happens until it finds the focus distance associated with the highest contrast. You can hear the lens moving back and forth "hunting" anytime you use the contrast AF. The 'measurements' themselves are actually VERY fast... it's the "hunting" around that takes time.

The reason this is "dumb" is because it must assume that it is looking for the same thing the entire time it is focusing. If your subject has moved, the camera doesn't know that and it just assumes that the contrast has risen sharply or fallen sharply due to it's focusing. This can result in either the camera thinking it has locked focus when it hasn't or it "hunting" back and forth trying to figure out why the object doesn't have the same contrast it used to. I've implemented my own contrast AF in software before, and while the basic function is very easy, putting the AI in it to determine if your subject has moved, etc. is quite difficult.