Calibrating your lens

Albert Pedrosa
Photo mania

HAVE you ever complained about the sharpness of your lens even after doing everything right during the shoot? Ever heard of autofocus micro adjustment? When you’re getting a soft focus on your images, maybe you should consider calibrating your lens. There are two ways to calibrate your lens: one is through the service center, while the other way is to do it yourself.

Unfortunately, not all cameras have the feature to adjust the calibration of your lens. Autofocus Micro Adjustment is a term used by Canon, while Nikon calls it Fine Tuning. Regardless of brand, lens calibration works by applying offset whether adding or subtracting to the known calibration. Often, this happens to an aging lens.

If your camera doesn’t have the autofocus adjustment, you can always bring the lens to the service center and have it calibrated back to its original form. Oh and yeah, there’s a cost involved amounting to a thousand pesos or more depending on the type of lens you have.

If you’re lucky to have considered this feature when you bought your camera, then you made the right choice. The do-it-yourself calibration can be done with a few steps. All you need is a tripod and a flat object with fine details that you can do the sample shot. Do it in a nicely lighted environment.

The rule of thumb is to multiply your focal length by 25 to get the distance of your object from your camera. If you’re using a zoom lens, calibrate at the longest focal length with your widest aperture. Do some test shot first, making sure that your center focus point is hitting the flat object. Take two shots, one using your autofocus and the other one with zoomed manual focus using live view.

If there’s no difference, then there’s no need to calibrate your lens, otherwise, perform autofocus micro adjustment. Find the function in your menu and select calibration for individual lens. Normally, there’s zero with negative values to the left and positive values to the right. When you opt for DIY, move the settings and do sample shots each time. Find the sharpest results by comparing it with your manually focused image.

Register the settings of the sharpest image. Your camera will only apply those adjustment settings every time you mount that particular lens you used during calibration. Make sure to double check by taking another AF shot and zoomed manual focus shot before you call it a success.

Keep on shooting, everyone!

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