Better Focusing in Live View?

[unpopular]

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.

It becomes luck-based if you cannot perceive the data required to make accurate focus. These new DSLRs are notorious for their bad finders, and even with a bright 35mm SLR like my Nikon FM, I still relied on the microprism, and focus assist on my Contax RX, which had an AWESOME UI and was much more precise than the system on my a350. FF would be easier to focus, for no other reason than the finder is larger. But, I still miss the microprism.

 

[HughGuessWho]

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

You dont think the aperture selected will have anything to do with focus? Not even how much of the shot is in focus? So if you shoot with a wide open aperture and, say, the foreground is in tack sharp focus, you dont think there will be any focus issues in the rest of the picture?

 

[christop]

I think all you guys are focusing on the wrong thing here. Look at the image at 100%. They look almost equally sharp to me. HOWEVER, in the first image the baby's face is motion blurred. Pay attention to streaks of light reflected in the baby's eyes. It doesn't look like camera shake to me, though, since the rest of the elements in the scene (such as the shirt) are not equally motion blurred. I don't know what the differences between the images are (you haven't posted the EXIF data for both images), but I'm guessing the shutter speed was increased for the Live View shots. Or the baby just stopped moving around as much when you switched to Live View.

The only solutions I can think of are a) use a strobe to "freeze" the motion, or b) use a faster shutter speed.