Schierer Space

I can certainly testify that the difference between my good photos and my great photos are the adjustments I’ve made in not quite doing things the way the automatic settings would have. Maybe it’s a subtle change in depth of field, maybe it’s a full manual setup. Don’t get me wrong: automatic exposure and focus are remarkably good in the vast majority of cases. You may be the kind of person who just doesn’t want to be bothered by all of the controls… you just want to point, shoot and be done with it. Hopefully this section will help you decide whether any of the buttons and dials are worth having.
Remember that most all cameras will do these things for you automatically if you choose the correct setting, so this section is more about what your capabilities will be if you choose to deviate from “full auto”.

Details below

The first two items which the photographer learns to control are exposure and focus. Personally, I started dabbling with exposure long before I felt comfortable deviating from the automatic focus. This was also a function of the G2 (GG class), which had manual focusing, but it was awkward to use effectively. Now that I’ve gotten comfortable with my SLR, I often find myself tweaking the focus manually when I have time to make the shot. I’m still not comfortable manually focusing on the fly for most shots though.
As discussed previously, exposure is adjusting how light or dark your image will be. Smaller cameras often allow you to use “Creative Zones”*, rather than direct adjustments of Aperture or Shutter Speed. These settings are often represented by icons which preset the camera to favor shutter speed adjustments over aperture or vice-versa. These can be quite handy, and are an excellent tool for learning how to set up the camera for different types of shots (or just to make the shot and be done with it). As you move up into N, GG and SLR, most cameras are providing Aperture Priority and Time Priority modes, where you can manually fix one setting and allow the camera to adjust the other. If you have priority settings, you will usually have a full Manual setting as well.
Even if a camera supports Manual Focus, my experience has shown that it usually doesn’t work well. My guess is so few consumers actually USE the manual focus, that making it work well is just not a priority. RM and N cameras may not even have a manual focus. If they do, they will work similarly to GG types. Non-SLR digital cameras generate an image on the CCD when manually focusing. Sometimes this can be zoomed in so that the pixels of the LCD are a better match to the pixels on the CCD. Obviously your objective is to make the image look as crisp as possible on the display. Since the displays are often small and poor representations of the final shot, this is pretty difficult. Some cameras may provide a read-out which approximates the current focusing distance. I have found that focusing at infinity (say for astrophotography), is generally quite straightforward on a fixed-lens camera. Often the focuser will stop at that point, rather than going a touch beyond like most SLR lenses. I’d like to report that SLRs make this easy, but they only make it better. Certainly looking through the viewfinder at the actual image to be captured (thus SLR) helps a great deal, but most mid-level SLRs I’ve looked at have lousy screens* for focusing. Some cameras do offer Focus Bracketing. This feature allows the camera to take three shots instead of one, where the second and third shots make slight adjustments in and out to the focus so that they ‘bracket’ the ideal focus point. The idea is that if your focus point is off slightly, one of the other two exposures might be closer.
Remote controls are really handy for cameras, and even the smallest cameras often support infrared (IR) remotes. Many also support delayed/timer shooting so that you can run into the picture to get that group shot. If you’re often traveling alone, or want to be in front of the camera more often, look into a camera with a wireless remote. They generally range about as well as a TV remote, and some use the primary CCD as the detector***. Many cameras now come with software packages which allow you to remotely control and capture images using your PC. Generally employing a USB interface, some of these allow you to set up time lapse photography and adjust various parameters on the camera. The Canon “RemoteCapture” applications are actually pretty disappointing, although there are many 3rd party applications with significantly more capability… for a price.
Finally, we must consider that more manual control comes at a cost. In order for those manual controls to be useful, you need to be able to get to them, and adjust them, in a hurry. Obviously, the smaller the camera, the less room for buttons and controls. Expect to drill through menus using a set of cursor buttons to configure most cameras. Two cameras with otherwise similar features can make or break the deal based on the arcane way their menus are setup. On the other hand, mid to high end SLRs have enough dials, switches and buttons to panic even a hard-core control freak (like myself). If you have a non-control freak in the family, you can always switch the camera into “full auto” for one user, and semi-manual for the other.
Personally, I leave my camera in “Program” mode. For Canon, this means, do everything automatically, unless I tell you otherwise. SO if I pick up the camera turn it on and squeeze off the shutter… I’ll get a picture that’s decent. I can then adjust exposure, auto-focus point, light metering, ISO, white balance, etc. from the various other buttons and controls. The bad news is that if I tweak something, and forget… it will stay tweaked in the next shot. I often wish for the ability to save presets (it is worth noting that newer models are now providing the ability to save custom camera presets on the main control dial).

I hope you’ve found this useful. Only one topic remains: Loyalty.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Advice, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.