This past weekend I did something I had never done before, which isn’t hard to do with camera stuff since I’m so new to this all. I calibrated my lenses!

What the heck does that even mean?!

It means tweaking the autofocus of your camera for the lens that you have on it. This hopefully means faster autofocus and sharper images. And you want to do this and check this, because each camera and lens are different. Each combination of lenses and cameras is different. This means that the manufacturers can’t get everything 100% correct all the time. It would be great if they could, but, there are just too many variables in the way for that. So, we put the lens on the camera, and do some micro adjustments to the autofocus to get things as correct as possible.

With my Sigma 150-600mm Sport, I’ve had an issue where if you pick up the lens and start shooting, it won’t engage in the autofocus (AF) right away. You have to manually focus a bit before the AF will take hold and finish the focusing job. This is a bit of a PITA for when you need to very quickly get the shot as you often do with wildlife. Because of this issue, I and been thinking about doing this for a while, to see if it will fix it. Spoiler: I don’t know if this fixed the issue, as I have not had a chance to play with it since. But I also don’t really think it will have fixed it. Just have sharper images for when it does kick in.

When I got my Sigma 150-600, it came with a thing, called LensAlign, to help you figure out your lens AF points. It is a gizmo that you put together, set it up and look at different points on the gizmo and see where you think you are focused and where you really are focused. It is a really cool design and super simple to put together. Probably one of the easiest things ever to put together, the directions were great, and the pieces are labeled so you can’t muck it up at all. As you can see in the image of it, it has a slanted ruler like thing, and a bunch of bulls eyes and the like. Yup, all the technical jargon here!

What you do is using the Lens Align, you align it to your lens using some sighting holes on it. Then you unfocus your lens, then you auto focus it, and take a picture. You then look at where it focused and can adjust things as needed from there. Easy! Right? Maybe? Not really…

I took the picture, I looked at the picture on the screen of the camera. I looked at the picture on my computer screen. And I couldn’t tell what was sharp or not where it was supposedly focused. I do have an eye issue (astigmatism) where I have slight blur, so that definitely does not help. I decided it was time to see if there was a better way, a computerized way that can do the looking for me to see if things were sharp or not.

I started looking at the software that is suppose to work with Lens Align, and it seemed kind of pricey, but I didn’t really know much about it. I did what everyone does, and YouTubed it and the only videos I found on it were by the people that make the software. No one else really seems to use it. That there is a red flag. The next thing I noticed was that you have to take a bunch of pictures, upload to your computer, let it analyze them, then go back take more pictures, and back to the computer, etc, until the software figured out what you needed to do for the camera to be at the correct settings. That sounds like a bit old PITA right there.

I decided to see if there was something else out there. And I was very happy I did.

I came across multiple people using something called FoCal. And right off the bat, I was hooked, because you hooked up the camera to the computer so you don’t have to do any back and forth with the files! It does most of the heavy work for you as well with most settings and such. It was also about the same price as the other software, so, I grabbed the old MC and bought a copy.

So yes, no sponsored content here, I bought it all with my own money.

The first thing you need to do is print out the image that you will be pointing the camera at. Then put it on a wall someplace where you can make sure it gets plenty of light (something I struggled with in my dark house!) You will also want to make sure you have plenty of space to do this with. If you are testing a 600mm lens, like I was, you will need 12 meters of space. That is 40 feet. That’s a long way. And I could only get to about 11.3m (37 feet.) And the cool thing about FoCal is, it knew. It knew I was at 11.3m, and it warned me, that it was shorter than it should be. But, I had no more space at all, so that extra .6m was not going to happen at all.

When you first setup, the software will run some tests whilst connected to your camera. It will check a variety of things like the distance, and amount of light. There are a couple of things that it cannot do by itself, like set the camera to aperture priority. So, you will need to know your camera and how to get to those settings. As well as how to set the micro adjustments for auto focus. So, read your manual or other books you have about your camera!

Once you and the software are happy with how things are set it, you tell it to do its job. It will change some settings, take images, analyze, make graphs, then it will stop, flash on the screen, and if you have your audio turned up, it will literally tell you to change your autofocus micro settings. Then you tell it you did that and it goes back to doing its job.

You go back and forth several times, until it says it has figured out your best settings for the camera and lens and you just set it and forget it. That is if you have a camera that can remember which lens is attached and can store that info. The Canon 5D Mark IV, which I have, can remember 40 different lenses, so I don’t have to worry!

I went through this process for the Sigma 150-600mm Sport lens I have, as well as a nifty fifty 50mm F1.4 lens that my Beautiful Bride had gotten for her camera. And I recently purchased the Canon 16-35mm F2.8L III, and did the testing with it as well. Which was kind of sad as that was the first time the lens was actually on the camera, so the first images, weren’t even real images.

This whole process actually took me the better part of a day (8am – 3pm) as I tried to figure it all out. So it is time consuming, but I’m expecting the results to be well worth it when I get time to get out side and play with the lenses again!