Have you ever taken a technically great photo using the perfect camera settings but the image still looked soft or just off somehow…
Well the culprit might have been a flaw that effects 10% of lenses. Camera manufacturers know about this flaw and choose to do nothing about it.
The flaw is called “decentering” and it’s when the glass elements in your camera lens are slightly wonky but still within specification and so camera manufacturers still sell the lenses anyway.
The issue is that decentering leads to soft images and frustration.
Luckily there is a simple experiment that you can do at home, with no special equipment, that takes less than 10 minutes per lens that will tell you if your camera lenses have been affected.
I recently did this test on the lens that I use the most and I was shocked with the results.
I found that the bottom half of my lens was super soft whilst the top of was razor sharp. This means that no matter what I do, the settings I choose or the conditions I shoot in, I’ll never get razor sharp images with this lens.
If I’d have uncovered that the lens was my bottleneck to razor sharp photos rather than my skills sooner, I’d have saved countless hours of worry and soft, unprofessional looking photographs.
If you want to take magazine quality photographs that make your friends, family and social media say “WOW” then you need to test your lenses to see if they’re decentered.
Testing lenses used to be a long, unscientific process with inconsistent results.
However, working with a optical engineer, I have put together a simple experiment that you can do at home today, in less than 10 minutes to check your lenses to see if they’re decentered.
Eliminate the frustration of taking amateur looking, soft snapshots and start taking professional looking photos right now.