On Sep 19, 2012, at 12:52 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote: > > On Sep 19, 2012, at 3:31 PM, Larry Colen <l...@red4est.com> wrote: > >> >> On Sep 19, 2012, at 11:17 AM, Paul Stenquist wrote: >> >>> But improved autofocus will be even nicer. If it's truly a step up, the K5 >>> IIs will take the lead spot ahead of my K5, and the current backup, a K7, >>> will go on ebay. >> >> >> I recognize that I tend to take photos in conditions that are a bit more >> challenging than most people face. I've spent the past couple of days going >> through my photos from last weekend. I'd say that I lost the most shots >> through mis-focus. Unfortunately I can't easily tell in lightroom which >> were manual and which were auto focus. The biggest camera change to improve >> my keeper ratio would probably be more focus points, each one restricted to >> a narrower range. I lost several photos because the camera focused on >> someone closer to the camera that was just barely in the frame. Then, of >> course, there is the ongoing problem with focusing on the microphone. > > Use single point autofocus. For singers with microphones use the top spot > and place it right on the eyeball when you squeeze the trigger halfway down. > For dancers, you probably want to use the second one down on verticals and > put it on the head. When shooting horizontals, you can use the upper left of > upper right and put it on the head of one of the two dancers. Once you get > used to using single spots, you can switch back and forth rapidly with your > thumb.
To a first approximation, that is the only way that I use autofocus. Sometimes on the center, and recompose, sometimes I pick a point off of center for "rule of thirds" composition. I seem to have gotten into some difficulty on a few shots, where I rotated the camera for a vertical composition and didn't adjust the focus point from being in the lower third to the upper third and the camera did a great job of focusing on the feet rather than the face. Who knew that there was enough angle that it would make a difference? Well, I do now. Also, George, what I do is pretty much the opposite of what you suggest. I have the AF button set to disable auto focus. I set focus with half a shutter press, then use my thumb to hold focus. As to focusing manually, I often do so. I find the split prism focusing screen invaluable for that. Especially with my non-autofocus lenses. I've also found that in low light, low contrast, situations, manually focusing with the screen is nearly impossible, and in almost every case, if autofocus will work, and it happens to focus on the right thing, it is both faster and more accurate than manually focusing. What I frequently do in situations where the light is too low for either normal manual focus, or autofocus, is to put the camera in live view, maybe use the info button to zoom in, and manually focus that way. Unfortunately, it takes so long to take a picture in live view mode that leaving the camera in live view when shooting action is useless. Even without shutter lag, the visual lag in live view, in low light, is a significant fraction of a second. I have to focus in live view, switch it back to optical, then hope that my subject doesn't move out of focus. I also have to remember to move my face to the camera, rather than move my camera to my face, or I'll front focus by 10-20 cm. > > That being said, a narrower range and more points would be nice, even when > using single point. > >> >> Beyond that, faster accurate focus in stupid low light would really help. >> Dancers just are not considerate enough to only move perpendicular to the >> line of focus. >> >> One feature that would really help me would be different exposure metering >> modes, one where I could say to not meter on the bright back lighting, >> another, where it would ignore dark backgrounds (though that is more a >> lightroom issue). > > You already have that. It's called exposure com. If you don't want it to > meter on the bright background, give it a plus one stop or more. If you don't > want it to meter on the dark background, minus the exposure. If the background were consistent, and exposure compensation would work, I could just set the exposure manually and leave it be. What I need is to be able to tell the metering to ignore any point that is above (or below) a certain EV. A case that I run into often is photographing dancers, or martial artists, in a room where the light source is often, but not always, in the frame of the picture, and there is nothing that I can do about it. The light source is where it is, I am where I am, and the subject moves around. I'm going to pull numbers out of the air, I don't know what EV actually relates to how much light. I don't use a manual meter enough for that. Sometimes the light is falling on the subject and they might be at EV 7, sometimes they have their back to the light and they are at EV 3, and the light is EV 17. What I need is to tell the metering to ignore any point that is over EV 15. So that whether the subject is at EV 3 or EV 7, or anywhere in between, they'll be properly exposed, whether the background is EV2, or EV16. LIkewise, spot metering doesn't work when the subject is moving around and isn't always in exactly the same place in the frame. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
