Troubleshooting Photos –
Foreground Out Of Focus
Problem
You took a picture of a mass of flowers but the ones closest to the camera are all out of focus.
The mass of red chrysanthemums in the foreground was supposed to have been in focus but the combination of aperture and shutter speed used – f4.5 at 1/400 sec. – does not provide enough depth of field to keep the foreground flowers and the background flowers in focus. The situation needs either more light (to make the aperture close down enough to provide depth of field) or a long exposure time (again, to allow the aperture to stop down). But remember this photo and its causes for a time when you might want to limit depth of field deliberately for creative purposes, as described in About Depth of Field.
What should you look for?
There are two possibilities here – one is that the camera is closer to the red flowers in the foreground than its minimum focusing distance, so it couldn't focus on them. The other is that the camera could not focus over the distance between the closest red flowers and the most distant ones.
What should you do?
Clearly, these are different problems, so you have to figure out which it is so you can avoid the issue in the future.
The first possibility is unlikely – contemporary cameras at just about every price level can focus on things that are very close to the lens (many even have a macro setting, which can focus on objects that are almost touching the lens).
The second possibility is more likely, with two options here.
Autofocus can play funny tricks, so it's possible that the camera could have focused at its maximum distance, thus putting near objects out of focus. That's unlikely, though, because everything in view is relatively close, particularly the flowers at the center of the picture, and the center is usually the point that auto-focus zeros in on.
The second option is likely, because the scene is not very bright, which tends to open up the camera lens' aperture and an open aperture reduces the lens' depth of field. For a hand-held picture in moderate light, it's very likely that the distance between the nearest and farthest flowers exceeds the camera's available depth of field.
In this instance, definitive proof comes from the photo's EXIF data, which says that the photo was taken at f4.5 (with the lens wide open, as it needs to be at a high shutter speed in a light-&-shadow situation like this) and 1/400 sec. (moderately fast). The distance between the closest in-focus object and the farthest in-focus object will therefore be very shallow – much too shallow for a scene like this, that covers a large flower-bed.
How do you fix it?
Although there are suggestions elsewhere about using sharpening to simulate good focus on slightly out-of-focus shots, sharpening will not work on an image so out of focus, so the shallow version of this shot is not salvageable.
To get this shot reliably, you need a tripod and a long exposure. For example, the deep version of this shot was made at an aperture of f29 (the aperture is stopped well down) and 1/10 sec. (far too slow a shutter speed to hand-hold). Another alternative might have been to provide more light, so the camera lens would stop down while the shutter speed stayed high enough for hand-holding, but providing the required amount of light could be a serious challenge.
Another way to get the shot, if you don't mind sacrificing some resolution, is to back away from the flower bed. Depth of field decreases rapidly as you get closer to the subject; conversely backing off from arm's-length from the point you're focusing on to arm's-length-and-a-half slightly more than doubles the available depth of field. If you're willing to back off from the subject, then crop the shot back to the framing you want with your image-editing application, you may get the picture you have in mind without resorting to a tripod.
Related information
Controlling depth of field is an important creative technique in photography, as described in About Depth of Field.
