Paraddox Photo

As I mentioned in a previous post, me and my friend Andi Popescu we went to shoot the opening of new factory here in Timisoara.

The first part of the event took place at the factory itself in a very large hall where a lot of machines were functioning. After a few minutes we realized that our cameras did not focus properly and we had no idea what was happening.

My Canon 70-200F4L lens, which I must say that never missed a shot in the 2 years I owned it, started focusing totally weird.

I was about 5 meter away from my subject and when I looked through the viewfinder the subject looked focused and all seemed OK, but as soon as I took the shot I saw on the camera LCD that the subject was blurred and the wall behind him was in focus.

At first I thought it was because I made a mistake so I went near the entry the hall and took a few test shots of a fixed subject(a garbage can) and everything looked fine. Thinking it was just human error(my error) I went back to shooting the event inside the hall just to see the camera behaving weird again.

I cursed for a while and started shooting each subject 3 times to make sure I get at least one good shot.

At one point I figured a way around the problem: the subject had to be closer than 4 meters or it wouldn’t focus properly, and you can image what kind of shots you can get from 4 meters away with a 70mm lens on a crop camera, especially when you want to get 4-5 people into the shot.

A couple of hours of this weirdness went by and by then I thought my lens was broken and I was thinking of sending it to be repaired.

The next event in the day was a conference where the lighting conditions were worse that those at the factory but surprisingly the camera/lens behaved flawlessly.

In the evening when I downloaded the images on my computer I noticed that all my wrongly focused images were taken near a big machine in the factory.

From what I know that machine had some kind of large electromagnet in it and it seems that every time I went near the machine the focus mechanism in the camera/lens started to go nuts. The worst part is that the machine was placed in the middle of the hall so I was around it most of the time while shooting there.

This is an example of what could go wrong at such an event, and is something that not in a million years would have I anticipated. I think that the EM field affected the camera sensor also because even the focused images are not as sharp as the ones the lens usually delivers. The same happened to Andi with his 400D and Tamron 17-50m f/2.8.

All in all I’m happy that my lens isn’t broken but I’m pissed that 60-70% of my shots are worthless. I’m not shooting anymore factories from now on.

And to change the subject, if you are into car performance tuning and you are located in or near Timisoara go check these guys out eobdtune, they have some nice info in there.
Andi Popescu has a great new post so go check it out.

I’ll also have some new images in the next days so come take a look or to make it simpler subscribe to the RSS feed

Have a great weekend people