Sharp

"It's not sharp."

Those words haunt me now, 45 years later. The person who spoke them was the photographer at the newspaper where I worked, and he was looking at a black & white sports photo I had taken. Even though it was a small, rural weekly, he was a photography pro who had experience in the Army and at a major motorcycle racing magazine. He ended up at this podunk weekly because he married the publisher's daughter. (But that's another story. A long, long story. But anyway.)

I thought the image was fine. But I looked more closely, and I saw it. And I can never unsee it. The image was not sharp.

In the last week, to get flicker images with my DSLRs and motion trigger, I pre-focus manually and turn off autofocus. Sometimes the image is sharp, sometimes it just misses. I decided to give autofocus a try, just to see what would happen. I used the Canon 1D Mark II #9 to save wear and tear on my newer cameras, and the 100-400mm zoom at 320mm. The first 76 images missed the subject and were focused on the background (including some of the flicker), the next 20 looked like they were in focus, then there were another 69 fuzzy ones before I retrieved the card.

The 20 "good" images were of a crow perched on the left side of the birdbath. The focus point hit him on the legs/lower body. If he had been parallel to the camera it might have been OK, but his head was a few inches closer to the camera than the focus point, and that was just enough. In wildlife photography, 99% of the time you want the eye to be sharp, and on these 20, it was not. I could zoom out as far a possible and come up with an image that would be acceptable to post on Facebook. Someone might even comment, "What a great picture of a crow." But I would know. As Richard used to say, "It's not sharp."

I could set the focus point higher, but I'm not sure that would increase my chances of success. I think using autofocus with motion trigger is just as big of a crap shoot as using manual pre-focus. Unless I'm behind the camera and setting the focus point on the bird's eye, it's a matter of chance whether the image will be sharp.

With that preamble, here are this afternoon's images. The first one is the autofocus crow, not sharp if you examine it closely. The other three are prefocused, tack sharp and technically some of the better images I've gotten with the 1D in the past 20 years.