What Focus Can Do

I'm standing on my porch messing with a lens.  I'd recently switched to manual focus to take pics of these beauties.

 

About twice a year my subject matter briefly leaves the face/back/hair/freckle/foot of a child and I switch into a crazy flower taking mode. So here I am embracing flower mode with manual focus and then that mode began morphing into take pictures of random things on my porch while playing with focus. It's a hard mode to find. Actually, not many people dare tread into Random Porch Things mode. But if you ever find yourself on that thin precipice tentatively peering down into house minutia jump right in, it doesn't hurt.

This is what happened to me.

Fun light blobs in the background always make great pictures.

Usually, the goal is to have something in focus in front of those blobs.

 Being close to focus, but not quite focused, is worse than completely out of focus. Do you hear the really loud "ALMOST!!!!" screaming from the image? I hear it in a lot of my life, er...I mean, photos.

Then focus. 

 Clarity. Clearness.

Light blobs doing what they were born to do. Accentuating the cross with their color and variety, yet not being the purpose of the photo.

But on the porch, focus continues to change. Perhaps I should go find out what those light blobs really are?

Funny, the cross just disappeared altogether.

I didn't change anything but the focus ring on my lens for all 6 of these photos. I stood in the same place (without tripod, hence the tiny angle differences) and just changed my focus depth.

Life lessons from a silly porch thing.