Ok, let me explain this right from the start. For the past year or so I have gradually become more interested in photography, for Christmas last year I bought myself the Canon EOS 600D.
I’ve been learning all about the different modes etc and just last week I had an opportunity to show some of the skills I had learned as I was attending a friends wedding.
I was by no means the official photographer, they had paid someone else to do that but I was pretty much copying what he was doing and taking the same group shots that he was during the afternoon.
It was tricky because I didn’t want to muscle in on what he was doing, but I took lots of pictures.
Anyway when I got home and viewed them back the group portraits shots I took are simply awful, focusing issues mainly.
Allow me to explain. I did not have a problem fitting everyone into the frame, I was only using the standard kit lens 18-55mm, I was varying the focal length depending on the amount of people in the shot and I was shooting on manual mode.
I wanted to keep the background blurred and out of focus so I selected an aperture of f5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second. It was a moderately sunny day with good light and I felt those settings should offer me decent backgrounds without over exposing the sky etc.
For that part the images worked well, but the focusing issue was the problem.
On the 600D, the focus can be set manually, but I used the 9 point AF system built into the camera. As far as I can tell, you can set it so that it will automatically detect which focus point(s) to use or you can manually select which one. (Only one at a time)
I left it to automatically select, when I was shooting just two people that was fine because the focus was on the face of both of them and they turned out well.
However, once I photographed a group shot the focus got confused, I have some people in focus and others almost as blurred as the background.
So my question is, how could I of avoided that? I understand that I could of selected a small aperture, say F16 in order to keep everything in focus but that would of included the background as well which I didn’t want.
Which settings should I have used?
How should I of been operating the cameras auto focus system?
Should I of been using a different lens?
Advice, comments and criticism greatly received.
The camera has four metering modes, it was on evaluative metering.
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