-
Tip of the Day
Morning Team, Karl here. Here is a great discovery that I have not heard before. When standing around your event with your camera in “Stand-by”, shut off the auto focus mode. It will save batteries, but more importantly, it will save your auto focus motors. They are working like mad when you are waving your camera around looking for something to record.
-
17 Replies
-
We don’t use auto focus!
-
What does that mean? We? Nobody? Nobody in this forum? Stupid responce.
-
He should have said; “We dont admit to using auto focus”! Thanks for the tip!
-
What he means is that auto-focus can be unreliable and so professional shooters don’t like to use it.
But you’re right, whenever someone mentions “auto-focus” around here they shoulnd’t get a terse respons implying that they’re an idiot for even thinking about using it.
If everything goes perfectly, I’d never use auto-focus either. But the people with that attitude fail to account for the fact that as event shooters, we don’t always have the benefit of having everything going perfectly. Sometimes things pop up quickly that I have to shoot. Like the bride may suddenly come out of her dressing room into a backlit hallway and I try to shoot her walking backwards while turning on my light and adjusting the manual iris and zoom. In that situation I will CERTAINLY turn on auto-focus right away. Once I get the other factors taken care of I’ll come back to the focus and attend to it manually.
I have also used the AF when I’m doing a pre-focus. If I’m doing a tripod shoot of a table setting, I’ll zoom in on the flowers, hit AF, turn it off and then zoom out. After years of shooting I have yet to see that technique fail. The problem with AF is that it can become confused. If you use it in a situation where it has no chance of being confused then it’s absolutly safe to use it.
It’s a tool, just like any other. You could easily compare it to auto-audio-levels. Yes, I’ll adjust them manually with headphones when I have a wireless mic plugged in, but for the camera mic gettnig natural sound at a reception I’ll switch it to auto. AF is the same way, you just have to know when and how it’s ok to use it. You don’t want to use it all the time, but never using it is a bit silly too.
I always want to ask the “never use it” people what they’d do in my walking-backwards example above. There are more jobs there than I have hands, something has to be put off for a second, I think that AF is a good tool to tide me over for a few seconds in that situation.
-
If your camera has a “Push Auto” button, you have the best of both worlds!
Regards,
Doug Graham -
If your camera has a “Push Auto” button, you have the best of both worlds!
====Ohh, I love that button! 🙂 It’s certainly the safest way to use AF ’cause you won’t accidentally forget you’ve left it on.
-
Very insightful and articulate. I have to say that shooting live events in not perfect light that manual focusing is a tremendous challenge. I shoot with a PD-150, and the new Z-1 and rarely have problems that I can’t recompose and reset the focus. If I was younger with better eyes, and more time I would use manual focus more.
-
The “Push Auto” is even a better technique.
-
Yes, the key is to manage when and how you use AF and to not just leave it on. I’ll often be shooting people dancing and I’ll decide to make a quick whip from one dancer to another. I’ll do the whip in manual focus but then instantly hit the AF-button for a half second once I land on the new subject. I then let go of it and go from there, but I’ve found that the AF can put me a lot closer to where I want to be (a lot faster too). I consider this kind of use to be a must for my work.
-
I certainly do not mean to sound snotty! But since you asked, I will answer your question. You said whay would I do in this situation:
“shoot walking backwards while turning on my light and adjusting the manual iris and zoom.”
My Answer: turning on the light takes no more than a half-second (no different than turning on auto-focus I assume). After that, the left hand is the focus hand, the right hand is on the zoom, and the right thumb rides the iris. In general, if you are zooming out and slowly turning the focus clockwise you will have no focus problems… if the person is going the other direction and you are zooming in while turning the focus counterclockwise…this is where the real skill comes in. However, with motion is is normal to expect some quick patched of softness…tv viewers are “trained” to see it so it is no big deal if it happens on occasion for a short moment.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up