in focus
- idiom
- /ɪn ˈfoʊkəs/
- Students indicated on the student survey and in focus groups that food tastings were the most popular promotional activities.
- shift in focus
- change in focus
- difference in focus
Reawakening fashion I think should be more in focus than Sleeping Beauty.
- Reawakening fashion I think should be more in focus than Sleeping Beauty.
- But with low light levels, it shrinks and you're only in focus if you're right there.
- The gentleman in the front is pin sharp in focus and that background has a beautiful blur.
- We don't want to just watch movies at theaters where they don't have it in focus or it's not loud enough.
- Nigel was going through a tough period of his life and was not quite in focus.
- So if you're shooting me sitting here talking as our camera person is, hopefully I'm in focus.
- And then finally in our sense of our vision is quite sharp and we can not only see things in shapes and in focus, we can see colours.
Examples
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Her face is appropriately caught half in focus, half out; half in darkness, half in light.
Blog text (33) -
You do need to be in focus, you need clean lighting and you need your photos to be dead on.
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So if you try this and you have the background object completely in focus, nothing will really happen.
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It's because I believe in focus and doing what you do really, really well.
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It's not even in focus, is it?
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And, Pete, please, try and keep it in focus, will you?
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The gentleman in the front is pin sharp in focus and that background has a beautiful blur.
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And then finally in our sense of our vision is quite sharp and we can not only see things in shapes and in focus, we can see colours.
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In the background, but still very much in focus, is the image of the two poker-faced United States policemen.
Academic text (1995) -
The photograph of the mountain is stunning because it is in focus, capturing every detail clearly.
Synonyms
Antonyms
How Focused
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is compositionally transparent: 'focus' denotes clarity or sharpness and the preposition 'in' indicates being within that state, so a learner who knows both words can infer 'in focus' as 'clearly defined or sharp' in visual or attentional contexts. This preposition+noun pattern to mark location or state is common in English (e.g. 'in view', 'in sight') and cross-linguistically familiar, making it accessible to a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase in focus comes from cameras: when a photographer moves a lens until the picture is sharp, the subject is in focus. That clear picture image became a way to say something is 'clear' or that you are 'paying attention' to it, so today it means something is clearly defined or concentrated.