Focus on the nearest eye
1 min read
When depth of field is shallow, which eye you focus on is the difference between a portrait that works and one that does not.
At a wide aperture, the band of sharpness in a portrait can be shallower than the distance between someone’s two eyes.
Focus on the one nearest the camera. Viewers look at eyes first and forgive softness almost everywhere else — but a portrait with the far eye sharp and the near one soft reads as a mistake, even to people who could not say why.