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It's a classic technique - find the part of the scene you want to focus on, point the camera at the focus area, establish focus and then re-compose the scene before you press the shutter.
This produces an odd behaviour in a photographer that makes him or her look like they don't know what they should be pointing at!
- back and forth, often several times.
But users of automatic exposure and autofocus should be careful. If you hold the shutter down to lock autofocus and then re-point the camera to re-compose the scene, your exposure could turn out to be wrong. This is because many cameras not only lock the focus but the exposure at the same time.
If there is a lot of variation in the brightness of the scene, if you lock the exposure while establishing focus, the exposure may be unduly influenced and be incorrect for the scene you actually shoot once re-composing it.
To avoid this, you have a number of options:
1. Switch to manual and remember the correct aperture and shutter speed from the scene as composed.
2. Remember the correct shutter speed and aperture and then force the auto-mode to reproduced these settings by using the exposure (EV) compensation options.
3. Don't recompose, but use off-centre AF sensor points to find focus.
4. Bracket the exposure (take a sequence with the camera deliberately under and over exposing two out of three shots). Hopefully, one will be perfect!
If you have any camera technique tips - why not share them with us here?
Ian
This produces an odd behaviour in a photographer that makes him or her look like they don't know what they should be pointing at!
- back and forth, often several times.But users of automatic exposure and autofocus should be careful. If you hold the shutter down to lock autofocus and then re-point the camera to re-compose the scene, your exposure could turn out to be wrong. This is because many cameras not only lock the focus but the exposure at the same time.
If there is a lot of variation in the brightness of the scene, if you lock the exposure while establishing focus, the exposure may be unduly influenced and be incorrect for the scene you actually shoot once re-composing it.
To avoid this, you have a number of options:
1. Switch to manual and remember the correct aperture and shutter speed from the scene as composed.
2. Remember the correct shutter speed and aperture and then force the auto-mode to reproduced these settings by using the exposure (EV) compensation options.
3. Don't recompose, but use off-centre AF sensor points to find focus.
4. Bracket the exposure (take a sequence with the camera deliberately under and over exposing two out of three shots). Hopefully, one will be perfect!
If you have any camera technique tips - why not share them with us here?
Ian
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