Okay, so the weekend…

Okay, so the weekend Flickr challenge was to photograph fire. I tried to set up some shots this morning, and once I looked up 'white balance' and figured out how to set it to 'custom' instead of automatic, I think the candle ones came out fine. But...

I had a hellish time trying to get the kettle photos to not be blurry. Most of my attempts were much blurrier, even after I resorted to resting the camera on the counter. Usually I have a pretty steady hand. Any ideas why these would be so much harder to focus than normal? I was really confused and frustrated.

3 thoughts on “Okay, so the weekend…”

  1. I think fire is hard to get into focus because it really does not have well-defined edges, even though we tend to feel it does. So, when it is frozen, as opposed to seen live, it always looks a bit out of focus. It might be interesting to see if a video of fire is equally hard to focus on as a still photo.

    These are beautiful.

  2. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    David, I’m glad you like them. What you say makes sense, but look, the candle photos are reasonably sharp. So it’s not just an issue with fire — and besides, with the kettle photos, the kettle was blurring at least as much as the fire was. It’s so confusing…it’s got to be something about the settings, right? But all I changed was the white balance. I may have also had it in Macro mode (for taking close-ups) — I’m not sure, because the manual mode options confuse me a bit.

  3. Dear heart,

    I am going to guess that you were using the autofocus feature on your camera. Many of these work by trying to optimize the edge definition of parts of the image. Flame, by it’s nature doesn’t do well on edge defintion. The candles probably worked because the flame is a small part of the image. If your camera supports manual focus, that may be the way to go.

    With all of love,

    C. J. Czelling

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