*sigh*... Manually focusing 50mm on D40

[Eberbachl]

That's right. Hide your 18-55 and 70-300 for a while, and stick with the 50.



It will be great for you, and I bet you end up loving it!

[Mr Guy]

I'm glad we talked you down from the ledge!

Love your nifty fifty, soon you won't know how you put up with your other lenses! It's like a gateway lens into the high grade professional glass.... just one super sharp lens can't hurt, right? Go on...take a few pics... it'll be fun...

[KimberleyPhotography]

I bet never taking it off would do wonders for my skills. We shall see

Thanks for the help!

[Cuchulainn]

As others have mentioned the Depth of Field is vary narrow at 1.8. This gets more narrow the closes you get so fine focusing becomes key. If you find you are getting quite getting what you were hoping to get in focus then you may also need to practice your manual focus skills.

I find it best to go about it like tuning a guitar. Get the subject in focus, go a little bit beyond that and bring it back in to focus again.

Also, try focus bracketing if you are having problems. Simply put, take a photo when the indicator dot is lit. Also take one focusing a little to either side of where the indicator lights and make note of which of the three (you can do more if you like) gives you the better result.

I find the one I pick varies from lens to lens, but the good news is I have 3 to pick from

[vandergus]

Alright, I'll just throw this out there as something you should check just to rule it out. The autofocus could be miscalibrated on your camera. You may not have noticed it with your other lenses because they are not as demanding of proper focusing as the 50mm is. How would this effect manual focusing? Well, the green dot focus indicator uses the autofocus sensors to tell whether or not you are in focus, so if your autofocus is off a bit, the green dot indicator will be telling you you the subject is in focus when it really isn't.

So break out a tripod and that book with all the text in it and set your lens to the widest aperture, f/1.8. Set up the camera and the book so the camera is looking at roughly a 45 angle. In the end you want some of the text to be in focus and the rest to be out of focus. Then pick one of the lines in the book and focus on it using the green dot as confirmation. Take a picture and zoom in to the focused area. Is the line you focused on sharp or is the line behind it sharp? If it's sharp, then great. You don't have to mess around with the inside of your camera or pay someone else to do it. Proceed with DOF learning and manual focus practicing. If not, well, we can talk about that later.

[wulf]

Something like an open book is a good subject for exploring depth of field. My subject of choice was a ruler. You would need to do trigonometry to get exact values but the markings will make it easy to develop a feel for how wide your depth of field is at various combinations of distance and aperture.

Wulf

[ReflectingGrace]

i almost sent mine back because I felt the same way. now, like so many others have said, its the lens that stays on my camera. it just takes a lot of practice. i didnt even know there was a green dot indicator (until I read this thread!) - I was just going by what I see. all the picts in the first and second posts in my blog (link below) were taking with the 50mm. Its gets easier!

[daft_biker]

Originally Posted by wulf

Camera: Nikon D40
Exposure: 1/100s
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 90mm (Vivitar 90mm lens)
ISO Speed: 200

It isn't great but illustrates just how small the DoF can get. That also reminds me of another possibility. I prefer the tone of some of the other shots I took that evening but you can see that nothing is very sharp:

Good point (and pictures )....if you're up close and wide open you're lucky to get much, if anything properly sharp. I'd usually only use such a setting when doing abstracts or something just meant to look nice rather than for something I wanted critically sharp. The sensibly priced 50mm lenses with fast apertures tend not to be at anything like their best with the aperture wide open.....I try to keep my 50mm f/1.4 at f/2 or smaller if I want something nice and sharp.

A 1:1 macro lens (like the 90mm) should give something like 0.25mm DoF when used at minimum focus and max aperture......not that much really

I'll sneak in one of my fave pics too....taken at 5:1 (5x lifesize) with the lens wide open.....apparently there's 0.048mm in focus in this shot!

[JerBear]

Sounds like you have a lot of good advice here, but just in case, try the lens on another camera if you can. This will rule out if there is a problem with the lens. I doubt it, but just rule it out. I once had a lens that I was having problems with and it took me taking it back to the store and trying it out on other cameras to find that the lens was the problem.

Good Luck

JM

[morts]

Quick tip for portraits:

compose your shot any old way and use the focus indicators to focus on either one or both eyes of your subject. Once in focus, recompose the shot how you want it to end up and take the photo.

When the eyes are in focus it gives the photo much more character than if the camera AFs on the nose. Trust me, I've had plenty of wonderfully framed shots go wrong when the AF decided to focus on the *very tip* of my model's nose.