Technical Tip: Mobile Phone Focus Trick

Having recently become a student of commercial photography, I have begun to use medium format cameras such as Hasselblad 500/501 Cm's more and more, for both course work and personal projects. I have found,coming from a digital SLR background, that manual focusing on these cameras can be extremely difficult, especially without a prism or when using wide lenses and narrow depth of fields in low light situations.

While in the studio today i came up with a really quick and easy way of solving this problem. What i needed was a bright area with a contrasty design on which to focus, preferably small enough and thin enough to place in front of a model or object and fit within an acceptable depth of field. A mobile phone provided the perfect solution; thin enough to give an accurate focus on the object it was in front of and providing its own bright contrasty light source on which to focus.

By displaying a bold graphic or text on the screen and placing the phone in front of a model facing back towards the camera I was able to focus accurately in situations that would have otherwise been hit or miss. Its even helps prevent focus hunting in extreme low light situations when using my DSLR.

This is an extremely easy tip to employ as most photographers will already have their mobile phone handy, so no extra kit to buy. Phones are also fairly model friendly and not quite as invasive as shining a bright modeling lamp at your subject and melting their face.

To make this even easier i have put together this small focusing chart image and saved it as a mobile camera phone (including iphone) friendly jpeg file, just download it, save it to your mobile and when you need to focus just put the image up on screen and place it as close to what you want to focus on as possible.

Hope this tip is useful to people.