It’s a generally held truism that portrait photography requires a short telephoto lens to get the best results. We even tend to refer to 85mm lenses as ‘portrait lenses’ and the 50mm as a ‘poor man’s portrait lens on APS-C cameras (coming out to a 75mm focal length equivalent on a Full Frame camera). I strongly suspect that the travel photography out of covers like the National Geographic in the 80s, along with the Time/Life magazines is part of the reason we generally reach for the short telephoto when we photograph people.

The number one reason why images fail, is focus (possibly it’s a tie between that and poor composition, but even the latter can be excused by some as art 😉). There’s that gut twisting realisation when you are going through the images from a shoot only to realise that the focus was out. What could have been fantastic, gets added to the trash pile. We now have blistering fast auto focus, face detection, dynamic tracking, 3D tracking, a gazillion focus points, micro-tuning (automatically calibrated on some cameras even) and more. You’d think that it would be as simple as pressing a button and shooting. But it’s not. Although we can get passably sharp results almost every shot, we still miss critical focus from time to time (if not more occasionally) and it is mind-numbingly frustrating!

There are a number of things we can do to try and improve focus when we are shooting, whether it’s shooting a landscape, a moving animal, or a close-up. I personally feel that correcting focus falls under these three broad categories of; Calibration, Settings and Technique.