Why are so many shots out of focus?

[Pouget]

So I'm not a photographer other than my phone's camera (ahem) but I do know that digital cameras have auto focus and manual focus, and I guess 35mm has the same.

I also get that sets, especially for the bigger named sites, are taken by properly trained photographers.

So how come so many shots are out of focus, especially when looked at at the highest resolution (which I asume is some kind of selling point)?

Thanks

 

[Arch Stanton]

I agree. I can't understand why so many modern pictorials have this fuzzy out of focus look. It just ruins what should be showcasing a woman's beauty and sexuality.

 

[S-type]

There are several aspects to this perception, first of which is to remember that we are seeing images at some distance from the original masters, which have been released (or hacked) and subsequently processed/compressed/decompressed an unknown number of times such that pixellation may have started to intrude?

Secondly, many of the photographers these days are self-taught, using technically excellent automatic cameras to disguise their inexpertise. In fully automatic mode they produce very good results, but tend to focus very precisely on specific areas of an image, with the frequent result that focus on the pudenda is perfect but is blurred on the face, or vice versa - possibly because the photographer doesn't understand how to achieve the depth of field clarity via an aperture/shutter speed combination, or simply doesn't know how to (or can't be bothered to) set the camera up - shot by shot with appropriate lighting - to achieve it?

Thirdly, some experienced photographers may use what is referred to as "soft focus" techniques for "artistic" effects, or when using models who may no longer be in their prime, or simply may not be at their best on the day?

Fourthly, a photographer like Petter Hegre is revered for his technical excellence, but not for his porn photography. His photo-sets are master-works of photographic excellence, and any blurring is there for a reason. But his images would perhaps more acceptably illustrate a medical journal, or an artist's instructive study of female musculature and skin tones? The exception to this may have been 'Luba', whom he married?

 

[spacecadet]

As a bit of an amateur photographer myself, I can explain at least some of this phenomenon.

Old film cameras, with manual focus, had a split-prism in the viewfinder that allowed one to nail focus pretty much every time, wherever you aimed the split prism. And you had to know how to focus because AF didn't exist. This is why you never saw many out of focus shots in those days.

Modern cameras, with advanced AF algorithms, lack these split prisms. They are often available aftermarket, but few photographers realize this. They rely on the camera. Without the split prism, you pretty much *have to* trust the camera; the viewfinder image is simply too small to be able to nail focus without that split prism. The AF algorithms are very good in general, but certainly not without fault. The real old, experienced hands can still nail it by using the distance scale on the lens; problem is, many modern lenses are going to new electronic focusing mechanisms that make the lenses "focus by wire", so the focus ring is not physically connected to anything inside the lens and will thus turn infinitely. As such, a distance scale engraved on such a focus ring would be worthless as tits on a bull, which brings us back to square one - having to trust the camera.

This will get better as more people adopt modern mirrorless cameras with touch screens that allow you to literally point on the screen to any place you want the camera to focus on, and it will do so. Or, in the case of some upcoming Canon models, when looking through the EVF, the camera will focus where you're looking. These cameras are still fairly novel, and thus expensive, so you'll have to give it time.

 

[Pouget]

Thanks spacecadet. Reasurring to know it's as much technical as it is the photographer and their skills.