Autofocus or Out of Focus?

by Rolando Gomez
The sharpness of your subject’s “eyes” are critical in an image. Many beginning photographers with autofocus cameras tend to have the nose, chin or shoulder in focus, forgetting to place their focusing spot on the subject’s eyes when shooting. This is a prominent problem with photographers spoiled by autofocus cameras. Photographers who tend to rely on the camera, which by default focus at the center of the image.
As an example, after I’ve made my 72 dpi resolution tiff, with the longest side of the image at 450 pixels, I then run it through a droplet on my desktop created in Adobe ImageReady or I use Photoshop and "save for web." This reduces your file size considerably, as no image preview is saved in the little jpg icon as well as other file size, reducting features.

If you learn to focus on the eyes, compose the image, shoot and then save the final image as a jpeg when needed, your subject’s eyes will be sharp and you will not be labeled as a soft-shooter.