Post Focusing: Is it For You?

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

When Panasonic announced their Post Focus firmware update one blog commenters said “Olympus’ Focus Bracketing and Focus Stacking is for serious photographers. Panasonic’s Post Focus is meant for sloppy people…” Yet, a reviewer once said of the Lytro camera, “a new professional Light Field Camera that lets you create ‘Living pictures’ that can be re-focused after shooting…” As they used to sing in the sixties “Different strokes for different folks.”

I remember when autofocus was just started coming into vogue and I wondered aloud—no blog at the time—“What’s so hard about focusing my lens?” These days we are so used to AF that having to focus a lens seems like a hardship and lazy me, I tend to use MF lens using the hyperfocal distance. This is the kind of stuff that was running though my head when mark loaned me a Lumix G7 with the post focus firmware update. (For the record all of my Lumix cameras are too old, in Internet years anyway, to take this update.)

Here’s what I found—it’s fun, it’s easy to do and useful for certain kinds of shots, especially when shooting macro shots like this one. And it’s easy to do: Just play back the image, use the touch screen to select the critical point of focus and save the resulting images onto the memory card. In the above shot I wanted to focus only on Joe Cool and his view camera and the G7’s post-focus feature let me easily do that. And yes, that is gen-u-ine 35mm Snoopy film behind him.

Mark has written on the topic before and you can read his take here. You can also get a quick overview in the below video.