focus on eyes!!

Simon Holzman said:

Easy way... close the aperture half a stop to widen the depth of field. You'll lose a little of the bokeh, but it shouldn't be much.

Harder way, focus on the far eye and sway back half an inch when you take the shot.

Still, I'd stick with the first option... having that little depth of field means everything is out of focus. It also means you are using a longish lens, which tends to flatten the image a little. 70 or 75mm (100mm equivilent) is probably as long as it's worth going if you have the choice.

Nice shots !

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Gerry Winterbourne said:

Actually you are focused on the eyes - or, at least, on one of them. In #1 look at the lashes on the near eye, which are nicely in focus, compared to the other one.

As Simon said, one problem is that your DOF is too shallow. DOF calculations are always approximate but for a 77mm lens at f/2.8 and what I guess your subject distance was the calculated DOF is about 8cm. That gives about 4cm in front of the focus point and about 4cm behind. As your kid's eyes are more than 4cm apart you can't get both in focus. At f/3.5 and face-on #2 is better.

Another problem is using ISO1600. There is noise clearly visible in #1, which erodes detail; in #2 it looks as if you've applied a bit of NR, which also erodes detail.

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Gerry


First camera 1953, first Pentax 1983, first DSLR 2006
http://www.pbase.com/gerrywinterbourne

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kuuan said:

I am amazed how perfect, on the nearer eye, the focus is on both.
No problem there is an understatement.

and yes, as others point out, if you want the other eye sharp too you need more depth of field, a smaller aperture
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http://flickr.com/photos/kuuan/
http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/andreasgriesmayr
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=kuuan

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