Following the success of photography FAQ 1 we thought it'd be a good idea to come out and address some more of your frequently asked questions, and seeing as Lorna has got some haribo tangfastic in her pocket and promised to give me some provided we get home early tonight, let's go for a walk on the beach and get on with it. "Why do you point the camera away and back again just before taking a picture?" I'm focusing.
I use single auto focus most of the time because that means pone part of the view finder which is the dot, i can put it onto my subject, focus the camera till the focus where to lock onto and then i know which part of the
picture is sharp. Let's suppose the single point auto focus dot is in the middle of the viewfinder right now, if you focus the camera what's going to be in focus? the horizon, the shoreline over there but if i'm the point of the picture, then it's me that you need to have in focus, so you move that single point onto my face, press the shutter button half way, there will be a beep, cameras locked the focus, now you can recompose the picture, and providing you keep first pressure on that button, it will hold that focus.
Now there are times when i might move that dot around the view finder because it's very useful, if you're photographing a flower or something that's moving around in the breeze, i want the focus to happen almost the instant the shot is taken in case the flower moves a little bit and knocks itself out of focus. I'm also very forgetful, so let's say I've forgotten to move that auto focus point to a certain place and it's what, up over here somewhere, when you go to take the picture what have you got to do? you've got to put that focus point on the place you want it to focus. So, you move the camera across, you stick that auto focus point right onto my face, you do the beepy thing with the focus button, hold it, recompose the picture and take it.
"Should i use center point AF and recompose or switch AF points?" They're just two different ways of working, i prefer to focus on my subject and then recompose the shot whereas other people prefer to move the auto focus point around, a very good friend of mine a German photographer Verena-neuhaus she works all the time by composing the shot and then moving the auto focus point to the place she wants the focus to be. I don't move that fast, because i'm a bit fumbily, it's your call, there is no right or wrong there isn't one better than the other, it's what works for you. "Which AF mode should i use?" Well that's a call for you, because it depends what you're taking a
picture of. whatever you're taking a picture of will govern which auto focus mode you need to use. There are three films about auto focus modes, because it's too big a question to answer in an FAQ.
Click the links below, go and have a look. "Are you allowed a tanfastic yet?" No. "why do you pause before pressing the shutter?" I'm checking the composition, i'm running my eye all round the view finder, all along the top here, down this side and down this side to make sure all the gaps line up, if I've got a person in the shot is the gap between the top of their head and the side of the picture what i want it to be, is the horizon level, is the gap between the sky and the horizon on this side like this, the sames as it is on this side over here between the top
of the frame and the bottom, it's just lining everything up and then the very last thing i do if there's a person in it is look at them before i press the shutter to make sure they're okay, i don't like wonky pictures, so i do spend a moment looking around and also checking for seagulls and stray birds, stuff like that.
"Why do you like tripods so much?" basically, i'm lazy. The great thing about using a tripod
when you have time to do it is that you can set up your composition, you can look all around the viewfinder, you can line everything up, make sure the horizon line is nice and straight and then lock the tripod head into place, and then once that's locked you know that that piece of work is dealt with,
then you've got time to look at things like depth of field which will tell your
aperture, when you know your aperture you can start to work with your shutter speed. so i love tripods because i'm lazy. "what type of tripod do you use?" I use two, my light weight tripod is a bembo, this old boy here and loads and loads of you have asked me which model of bembo tripod it is, and i'd love to tell you, but as you can see it's very old, it's very battered it's had a long life and there's no label left on it, it's been warn completely away i have no idea which model this is.
But it was a great investment, i bought this twenty years ago and it's still going strong. The head is a man frost, i'm not quite sure which model of head it is but i did go online to the frotto website to look at all the pictures so i could find out so i could tell you but i can't find it anywhere so i can only assume that they no longer make it. But it's a very good quick release ball and socket head, tripod was probably a hundred and fifty quid when i bought it twenty years ago and i would say probably a hundred and twenty quid for the head. But what a great investment, twenty years of life I've got out of that. The other tripod is this baby, it's big and it's heavy, this is a man frotto i think it's er, yeah it's an o five eight man frotto tripod, it weighs a tonne, it's very very sturdy but what i really like about it is these little quick release buttons here, if i wanna drop the legs down i just press and shake and there you go.
How quick is that? and you can adjust it really easily just by pressing a button and letting it go. The other great thing with this tripod is because it weighs a tonne i might be a bit lazy about my
composition but it's a great upper body workout, moving this around all day long you can get a superb definite into pecks, lat's upper shoulder muscles you should see what i look like underneath my shirt, go on then get your shirt off.
No. "Do you shoot P S A or M mode?" i use aperture priority almost all of the time because by controlling what aperture i'm controlling something creative i'm controlling my depth of field, and i'm letting the camera go away and find a shutter speed to work for me. Aperture priority or A V, aperture value is my preferred option, i don't like shutter priority because if i set a fast shutter speed then there's a good chance that my camera won't be able to find a big enough aperture to work with it if we're in quite low light, but if i use aperture priority i can set the widest aperture that i can use, i can set a higher iso and know that the camera will always give me the fastest shutter speed that it can, i use manual exposure quite a bit for commercial work and almost always if i'm using flash, but you don't have to do it all the time but it's very very useful to understand what the camera does and times when it will get it wrong so that you can step in and use manual
exposure to fix things, programs do we use program? hm i don't really use program at all, but i do occasionally if i'm outdoors and i'm doing a high speed movement and getting action shots, stuff like that, and i'm using a fill in flash at the same time because the camera will speak to each other.
So which mode do i use, aperture priority most of the time, manual occasionally and that's really about it. "Which metering mode is best?" I threw like a girl then, it depends what your doing and what your
preferences is, which metering mode is best, is much to big an answer to answer in a few single sentences of an FAQ, go and watch the meeting films and they will explain all about it for
you. "Do crop factors effect image quality as well as field of view?" Possibly, but only the tiniest little bit because if your using and fx lens on a dx center camera, your light is projecting past either side of the sensor so therefore in theory your sensor is picking up all the light from the sweet spot of the lens, so in theory your image quality will be better, are you going to notice it? i doubt it, to be honest this is stuff i don't give any brain space to it at all because is it that important? i mean really? using an fx lens on a dx sensor does affect your field of view because it narrows it it has the effect of making the lens longer because it's projecting onto a smaller space, let me show you quickly, let's have a drawing in the sand.
Let's assume this is your lens, lights is going into it in this direction, it is projecting out of the back into
your camera body onto the sensor, this bit here, so the light is coming through and projecting onto the sensor. That's a really crap arrow, there we go. That is projecting onto the sensor and it's recording an image, so this is an fx sensor let's say on a fx lens.
A dx sensor is smaller, so if this represents a dx sensor like this then the light that's coming out to the sides which comes from the edges of the lens here and here that light is projecting here and it's missing the sensor so so in theory you are getting the best
quality from your lens by using an fx lens on a dx sensor, but really it doesn't matter that much the only possible thing to think about is if you're going to use it the other way around, if you put a dx lens on an fx sensor you may get cropping because the dx lens isn't pushing the light out so far, it's only pushing light into here and here, because it's meant to hit a sensor this size and not that size, and so if you can't tell your camera that you're using an fx lens on a dx camera you might get black netting on the end on the edges.
But honestly that's about all there is to it, it makes my brain hurt so don't worry about it too much. "How do i know i'm ready to upgrade from a compact to a DSLR?" whenever you feel that you want to, to be honest with you, but also ask yourself is changing from a compact and actually to upgrade to a Dslr, a Dslr gives you certain flexibility's to do things that a compact camera can't such as change lenses etc, but the image quality of a compact camera made in the last twelve
months is probably going to be way way much better than a Dslr made five years ago, i would say the more complimentary than
an upgrade.
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