Rational Action

The pictures I took at the Woman’s Basketball game at UPenn on Friday night shall be in tomorrow’s Spectator. Three of them to be exact.

Did you know the Spec is New York City’s 7th most read daily newspaper. You didn’t? Why not? I’m in it.

I took the pictures with a digital camera. Wow, I really don’t like cameras that do things for you. I wanted to set the aperature at its widest, point, focus, and shoot. However, the Canon Digital Rebel that Frankie had found for me had a few intricacies that I couldn’t get used to.

• As with most autofocus cameras, the manual focus was lackluster. Real MF lenses have some nice characteristics that let you accurately focus on a certain point. First, it takes a slight amount of force to turn them (so the focus doesn’t jiggle about). Second, the focus range (e.g. from 1 meter to infinity) is covered by a maybe a half turn of the focus “ring” or whatever the thing you turn is called. The AF lens, in MF mode, had a “gearish” feel when I spun it, and the focus range was covered by such a small turn that I couldn’t set myself on one point accurately. A slight tap of the hand and I would be focused on something else.
• So with MF mode out of the question, I had to autofocus. But since there was so much motion, the camera had no idea where to focus. Almost all of the pictures I shot were blurry. And of course I had to wait for it to focus before it would let me shoot. Half the time it wasn’t “ready” for shooting when I actually hit the shutter — so the shutter never fired. There went another picture.
• To change the aperture I had to use the wheel on the top of the camera. It’s more intuitive (for me) to turn a ring on the front of the camera.
• The “sports mode” let the camera take pictures even when its focus wasn’t “ready”. But in sports mode I lost control of aperture, ISO and shutter settings. If I put it in MF mode, I had all the aforementioned manual focus problems. As a result everything in sports mode was blurry as hell

The truth is that I could have overcome many of these problems by learning the camera better. By the end of the game my pictures had already improved. At the same time, manual focus cameras have some great features that autofocus ones fail to replicate.

My personal favorite: manual focus camera that can do aperture and shutter priority (choose an aperture/shutter setting and the camera does the light metering itself). Shoot with a prime lens (one that can’t zoom in or out). With that equipment, you choose your aperture/shutter, focus, and shoot. Ahh.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2004 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Photo. 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.