It's time for a small rant.

I have this small pet peeve about focus on photographs. I know, I know... I'm not perfect, I have photos where the focus sucks. Everyone has photos were the focus is shot to hell. No big deal, except that focus can make or break a photo.

I'm SICK of criticizing a photo for the focus being off and people responding with "Well, it's still a good photo." Actually, IT'S NOT. I don't care what your excuse is, if the main point of your photo is not in focus - and not intentionally out of focus for the sake of art - than your photo fails to satisfy my obviously overly high standards on what makes a good photograph. I want to SEE the subject. I don't want to have to squint. I don't want to have to shift through hours of Photoshop and that lovely thing called the sharpen tool to find what you really wanted me to see.

When it comes to sports, poor focus is understandable. There are so many things that can mess with it - bad lighting, auto focus gone horribly wrong, manual focus gone horribly wrong, God raining hot acid from the sky... for sports, focus is still really important, but it's understandable that some photographs that had the potential to be absolutely AMAZING will be shot to hell. This I can deal with.

It's out of focus portraits that drive me insane. First things first... IT'S A PORTRAIT. It's STAGED (unless it's street photography, than it's just like sports). It's IN YOUR CONTROL. You, the photographer, have more likely than not picked the location, known well in advance you were going to shoot there, and if you were smart enough, brought, at the very least, your tripod with you. SO WHY ISN'T YOUR PORTRAIT IN FOCUS? Poor lighting? OMGFLASHISNOTTHEDEVIL. Once you know how to use it, it's rather nifty. Kind of cool. Kind of nice to have to get rid of those god awful shadows. Kind of nice to have another technical aspect of photography to wield for your devious purposes. So use it.

And don't give me that "I use film, it's so much harder to shoot with!" excuse. Bullshit, I say. Either buy more film or stop being shutter happy. Wait for the right moment, don't just click buttons and hope it works out. Film is wonderful. Stop whining.



And I'll continue this later.