Bracketing Focus item through heavy glass window

[Ken Nielsen]

At night, A window had a beautiful arrangement of flowers inside with an overhead track light spot. Everything was dark inside and outside. The problem was I had to shoot from outside and through the window. I used a tripod and remote trigger and tried various settings to get depth of field but in low light it is hard to focus. AF only means the glass was in focus, I wanted to go a little beyond to put the first flowers in focus. I tried MF but never quite got it right.

I found myself wishing there was such a thing as "bracketing focus." Why doesn't somebody invent that? When it's dark you can't really see the focus numbers on the camera and those don't mean as much with fine focus as simply looking through the viewfinder for best guess. I tried upping the ISO to 200 and still had a time exposure of 30 sec at f8. I tried wider lens openings and shorter exposure times. None turned out great. I think the glass may have been a barrier to getting a sharp image also. I'm not sure. It looked great to the naked eye.

I Know it's not best situation or even a common shooting situation. Do you have any good approaches to this kind of shot?

TIA,

Ken

[Jim G]

MF, shoot, chimp, adjust, chimp, adjust etc... or Live View, if your model supports it.

Shoot jpg while adjusting - your preview will be bigger and you will be able to estimate correct focus on the small LCD on the back of the camera more accurately than using the much smaller embedded .jpg in the RAW file. Remember to swap to RAW for the final shot!

[DDCSD]

You could always take a shot, turn the MF ring a hair, shoot, turn a little more, shoot... That would technically be bracketing the focus. The camera doesn't have to do everything automatically, you can do it manually if you need to.

[Ken Nielsen]

"The camera doesn't have to do everything automatically, you can do it manually if you need to."

That is, of course, the bottom line.

Thank You,

Ken