Today most of our upper end cameras have the ability to adjust focus on a lens-by-lens basis. Using that feature can eliminate the front focus and back focus problems that some report with their lens/camera combination. That’s the good news, the bad news is that you have to find a way to determine what focus adjustment to store in the camera for each lens.
One of those ways is to use the LensAlign system from Michael Tapes Design. I have that system and I guess I should just say that I don’t use it. For me, it’s just too big a hassle getting it all set up and aligned to the camera. Not that it doesn’t work or it’s not accurate, because I believe that it is.
So my lenses have ended up unadjusted in the settings of my camera. And the LensAlign sits in its box on the shelf.
On Twitter I started seeing tweets about something called the Focus Pyramid from Allure Multimedia. The Focus Pyramid is much simpler in both design and use compared to the LensAlign. For one thing, the Focus Pyramid is made out of cardboard that you fold up into a pyramid yourself!
To use it, you just put it on a flat surface, aim your camera at it, and shoot some frames to identify where the focus point of your combination is. Give that lens a little + or a little — in the focus adjustment menus of your camera, and take another shot to confirm focus at the center of the target. They have a video to show you how it works.
The wildest thing? It cost just $9.99 as its introductory price. I couldn’t pass it up, at that price, and ordered one.
It works as advertised and takes just a few minutes to get a lens set up for your camera. All my lenses have been checked and adjusted (it just so happens that they all needed some about of + correction). I need to take more pictures to prove this all out, but the one’s I’ve shot so far have been focused right on the first shot at the widest lens apertures.
Now you surely know that a $9.99 system can’t be “just the same as” a $79.95 system. I suspect that the Focus Pyramid is less accurate because it is made of flexible cardboard and doesn’t have any system to be sure that it is, in fact, level and square to your camera’s focal plane. But it worked fine for my lenses. I don’t have any lenses with maximum apertures greater than f/2.8, so there could be trouble with f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses, I suppose.
Anyway, for $9.99, you can’t lose much by trying one.
