EOS R50 Only Focusing On One Item In A Group Picture And Not All Items

[alfred75]

I just bought the E05 R50 camera. I own an online business where I take pictures of mostly fishing lures, but also other smalls that I buy to resell. As far taking a picture of just one fishing lure or item goes, this camera does a great job. However, when I am trying to take a picture of two or more fishing lures together, or a fishing lure with it's original box, the camera will not focus on multiple items at the same time. It will focus on only one and the other(s) will be blurry. I have tried Macro, Group Photo, Manual Mode, Program Mode, Manual Focus, White Balance up and down and every setting on AF Area. I still have my old Canon PowerShot SX530 HS (bought about six years ago) and this has never been an issue with that camera. I am also finding that if I try to take a picture of fishing lure box, it will only focus on the end of the box closest to the camera, again, the back end of the box is blurry. Neither of these have been an issue with any camera I have had in the past, even ones when I first started this business 15+ years ago. Can anyone tell me why it's doing this and what I can do about it? I frequently need to take pictures of multiple items in the same shot so it simply doesn't work for me to not be able to do that. Please see the attached pictures of what it's doing. Thank you in advance for any help!

[Tronhard]

Hi Newton:
You are correct 😊! 

Depth of Field is influenced by a lot of factors: again for the in-depth background on this I will refer to the link on the article I wrote on this (thanks to my editors for their input!).
Equivalence: Sensor Size, Field of View, Focal Length and Aperture 
Equivalence is not such an issue when sticking with one sensor format, but it becomes significant when comparing, or in this case, transitioning between sensor sizes.

[stevet1]

I read something the other day that has given me great pause.

It's not your subject that is in focus, it's what lies underneath a spot on the two-dimensional flat plane of your viewfinder screen.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

Steve Thomas

[Waddizzle]

Note, theoretical plane of focus is not flat. It is actually curved like the surface of a round ball.  The engineers design corrective elements within the lens to flatten the curved plane. 

This is one reason why you may [see] people arranged in arc in large group photos. Or, the photo may be captured from a greater distance to capture all within the DoF. 

What separates a macro lens from a conventional lens is that a macro lens comes closer to a flat, two dimensional plane of focus. 

 

[Tronhard]

With regard to technique.  If you have not done so, I recommend downloading the R50 Advanced User Guide from THIS LINK and look on P265-9 for a feature called Focus Bracketing, which allows you to set the camera to take multiple images of objects that require a deep depth of field and combine them to make one very sharp image along the whole object. 

Essentially, once you have configured Focus Bracketing, you focus on the closes point of your subject and press the shutter.  The camera will take repeated images, shifting the focus toward the back until it cannot find something to focus on and will then stop.  The resultant images are then combined into one image, sharp across the whole depth of the subject as a JPG file.  For your purposes, this should be more than adequate.

For this, you will need a tripod and I would also recommend a shutter wireless remote release, or set the camera to shoot with a 2 or 10sec delay after pressing the shutter button to avoid camera shake.

[FloridaDrafter]

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@Tronhard wrote:

With regard to technique.  If you have not done so, I recommend downloading the R50 Advanced User Guide from THIS LINK and look on P265-9 for a feature called Focus Bracketing, which allows you to set the camera to take multiple images of objects that require a deep depth of field and combine them to make one very sharp image along the whole object.

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Trevor, that was what I suggested with my first reply, but I guess it went unnoticed by everyone or they just thought it was a bad suggestion, LOL!

Stacking is my choice for shooting displays of this nature, particularly the lure box which is at an angle unsuitable for just increasing aperture, IMO. When set up, it's no different than just taking the shot normally excepting you do need tripod and I always use the 10 second timer. The camera may delay a few seconds, depending on the number of shots, while it compiles the JPeG, but you can shoot Raw and compile in DPP 4 (my method). I'm not saying it's easy the first time as it may take some trial and error, it just depends on how good a grasp you have of DOF, like where it becomes unacceptably out of focus, so you need to plan your focal planes DOF overlap properly.

Newton