How to Get Your Camera Lens to Focus Sharply on Resin Objects

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words..... but a bad picture often doesn't tell a story at all.

I use a point and click camera for the photos on my blog and it does a pretty good job without me needing a lot of photographic skills. Over time I have learned to use a lot of the settings on my camera to improve my photos even more and I've also developed some Photoshop skills to help fix the less than perfect photos.

But when I'm photographing my resin pieces, I usually have trouble getting the camera to focus on the surface of the resin. The autofocus function can't work out where to focus on such a non contrasting subject so it doesn't focus on anything at all and you get a result like this:

But there's a really simple solution: get the camera to lock focus onto another object in the photo that is the same distance away from the lens. Here's what I mean.

Place an object on the surface where you want the camera to focus. Here, I'm resting a toothpick against the face of the bangle. Now, hold the shutter button down half way so that the lens focuses on that object. Keep holding it down but don't take the photo just yet. You can see the camera has now focused on the toothpick right in the centre of the frame.

Remove the object and fully depress the button to take the photo. Voilà! A perfectly focused photo.

I wish I'd learned this trick when I first started working with resin - it would have saved me such a lot of effort. I used to take hundreds of photos until I got one that was OK. Now, I know it's just a matter of getting the lens to lock focus and the camera will do all the work.

'Til next time.....