31 Days of Looking for the Little: Focus

IMG_4097 blurry chandelier

It’s just a little thing. A ring on your lens to turn, or a button to push partially down. But it can make such a difference in your pictures!

Sometimes it’s fun to experiment. To turn off the auto-focus and see what effect you can get. I like this fuzzy picture of the two large wheel-like chandeliers that hang in our church sanctuary, and I intentionally shifted the focus to take this shot.

But sometimes, the focussing mechanism doesn’t work right, and that is frustrating. My newest camera is particularly difficult to manage and the pictures sometimes come out unintentionally blurry. 

Much like perspective, which I wrote about a few days ago, focus can really change your view of life, can’t it? If I find myself focusing on the wrong things, then everything gets kinda blurry!

But if I can keep the focus on Center, on Jesus and the work he is doing in me, then everything else comes more clearly into view. 

It ain’t easy. And sometimes, even after all these years of knowing him, I still forget to keep that focus sharp. How about you?

Here’s a picture of the same chandeliers in sharper focus – there’s quite a difference, right? (Both pictures are heavily cropped, so they’re fuzzier than I wish they were.)

IMG_4098 sharp chandelier

Just Wondering

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Comments

  1. Guilty as charged! I need to focus and refocus on God every single day. Writing my devotional blog really helps me in this.
    Blessings, Diana!

  2. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m loving these little posts!

  3. A Pileated Woodpecker visited our place recently. I discovered the flash of red as he poked away at a tree in the woods beyond a kitchen window. I grabbed my camera to catch a photo of his rare visit, but was frustrated because the auto focus insisted on choosing the mesh of branches in the foreground and refused to give me a clear shot of the woodpecker. After several attempts, while I was fretting and fumbling to change to manual focus, he flew away and I was so disappointed … until I turned and discovered he had settled on the railing of my deck, right outside the next window! I was thrilled to get a closeup.

    It was a reminder that sometimes it’s hard to focus on the important things because we’re stumbling over other more trivial ones in the foreground.

    (The chandeliers in your sanctuary are so beautiful!)

    • What a great example of exactly what I’m talking about here! So glad you got a second chance at that lovely bird. And thanks for your kind words about the chandeliers – we had them made by an ironmonger who lives in the valley over the hill form us and we love them.