How to focus

Now, lets photograph using Soratama. After fixing a standard zoom lens onto your single lens reflex camera, attach the Soratama onto it and take pictures. At this point, your pictures might not be focused like the picture below.

透明球ではなく、周囲の背景にピントが合ってしまった。 — Instead of the clear ball, the focus was on the background.

There are two reasons why it wasn’t focused on the clear ball. One of the reasons is the ball is too close to the camera lens. The other reason is the focus mode is not working right.
When the ball is too close to the lens, a macro extension tube will solve the problem.
If you are using the auto focus function, the camera might be unable to judge where to focus on. (Whether it is on the image inside the ball or on the background or even on the edge of the ball.) In this case, please change the settings to focus on the center of the picture or to focus on an optional target. If it still doesn’t focus on the right spot, try setting the camera to MF (manual focus).

Here, we will use the MF. MF is an abbreviation of “manual focus” and it is different from “manual exposure.” Once you set the MF, please focus on the nearest spot. This means to pull out the lens until it can no more be pulled out. Then move the clear ball and find out the best position where the focus is on the ball. This will be the shortest photographing distance.
As you can see in the picture below, the focus is on the right place but the inside of the tube is also reflected on the picture. To avoid this, please use the macro extension tube and get closer to the target.