Camera Labs

Hey all, this might apply to any P&S, but I haven't noticed this with my old one. If I want to take pictures of just the sky, and I aim at it, the camera usually can't focus properly and shows that red box and says ".1 - infinity" on bottom, which I think is telling me my focus is out of range. Why doesn't it just go to infinity?? This got frustrating when trying to take an image of an orange sunset sky, but with no sun to focus on, so it was essentially looking at just orange in the distance, I had to point at the horizon for it to get focus.

Is this normal? The photos did come out in the end, but forcing it to do "infinity" focus was annoying..this is where manual focus woulda came in handy.

The image in question:




In this case I just ended up pointing it at the mountain top, and that did it, but if there was just sky, without the mountains, say I was zoomed in, it seems it wouldn't know what to focus on.

The camera cannot focus when there is no distiguishable detail.
So it focuses at the hyperfocal distance which gives you the maximun range for your focal length/aperture pair settings and gives you the range in which everything is in focus. In your example this is 1 inch from the camera to infinity everything is in focus
This is a feature that my DSLR doesn't have ( and I haven't heard of one that has it), it simply won't allow me to take that shot, press the buttun and nothing happens. I have to switch to manual focusing to take the shot.

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Radu
Canon PowerShot S100
Canon 50D , SIGMA 10-20 f3.5 ,Canon EF 24-105 L IS USM, Canon EF 100/2.8 macro Canon EF 50/1.4 ,Canon EF 85 f1.8,Canon EF-S17-85 4-5.6 Old Tamron 28-300 inherited from my Canon Rebel G film camera
Canon580EXII
http://www.errre.net

Ya that's what I assume happens, it focuses on "everything", however if I was taking a macro shot before, then I aim at the sky or something, and it can't find where to focus, often it will be blurry because the lens is still focused closely. To remedy it I focus on the horizon, or some trees down the road, which is as close to "infinity" as I can get...

I don't recall having this issue with my older camera, but then again, my old one didn't tell me if I focused incorrectly or whatnot, all I had was a green/red dot on the screen which I didn't always pay attention to .