Kodiak Brown Bear captured by D6 / 800f5.6 AFS
Heat Shimmer can occur anytime, any place and it will DESTROY your image quality to the point even AI can’t fix it! The bigger issue is, most photographers either don’t know about or recognize it when it happens. You might see it most often rising from a parking lot on a summer’s day. But it can happen with snow or as in this case, over the grass flats on Kodiak Island. I just got done convincing a photographer it wasn’t him nor his lens that produced his out of focus images. It was heat shimmer! There are two really good clues you can use until you recognize it happening. First, your camera has problems autofocusing. Next, the image looks out of focus in the viewfinder and you can’t make it sharp. In the video above, you will see waves of heat shimmer from foreground to background ripple through the video. That’s heat shimmer, the destroyer of image quality. It’s not the lens and it’s not you!