Set It And Forget
It
By Blair
Howard
Set It And Forget It!
Now I know you’ve heard
that before. It’s Ron Popeel’s catch phrase for his Holiday rotisserie. But it
can work for us photographers too
How To Shoot Great Photos – Properly
Exposed and Focused - 90% of the Time:
Why do you never see
press photographers adjusting their f-stops or changing lenses in the middle of
a shoot?
They use a simple
technique that takes most of the guesswork out of what they do. You can use it
too.
There’s an old saying
amongst photographers – “f-8 and be there.” You’ve seen them; I know you have.
It’s the technique they use when they stand with their cameras held high above
their heads, arms at full extension, shooting into the crowd without adjusting
their camera settings or lenses.
Many a press photographer
will sally forth, armed only with a camera body, a high speed motor drive, and a
wide angle lens (yes, they’ll have back-up units in the bag or car, but one is
all they need most of the time). He will, dependent upon the available light,
set the shutter speed at 1/250th of a second, the aperture at F/8, and will
pre-focus the lens to about 10 feet . Experience tells him that everything
between a distance of about five feet in front of the camera to almost infinity
will be in sharp focus or, at least, within acceptable focus.
The result: the shutter
speed of 1/250 will freeze all but the fastest action, and because of the wide
field of view offered by the wide angle lens, he doesn't even need to look
though the view-finder. The aperture set at f-8 will provide, in
combination with the wide-angle lens, all the depth of field he needs.
All he has to do is point
the camera in the general direction of the action, hit the shutter release, and
the camera will do the rest. He gets his pictures. They will be in focus (they
will be acceptably sharp), they will be properly exposed and, most importantly,
they will be acceptable by the editor – salable. This is how the Paparazzi
operate most of the time.
So, on an average day,
under normal contrast situations (meaning you’re not outside on a sunny day in
the snow or standing in the woods in the shadows ) you can put your camera into
manual focus mode, pre-focused at 10 feet, set your camera aperture to F/8, and
your shutter to 1/250th of a second, and your ISO speed to 200, and
you’ll get acceptable pictures at least 90% of the time. Yep, there will be
times when you’ll to make an adjustment – maybe low light will require a higher
ISO, but that’s about it.
This is a very liberating
way to shoot because you don’t have to wait for your camera to auto focus before
taking each shot. You just click and go. And in most cases, you’ll end up with
a perfectly focused, properly exposed photograph.
This is how I shoot when
I’m on the fly. When I’m teaching at our live workshops, I shoot like this
nearly every day. My aperture is set at F/8, my shutter speed at 1/250, and my
ISO at 100 (that’s the lowest ISO number on my camera) and I usually get some
amazing pictures. Best of all, I don’t have to wait for my camera to focus like
I would have if I have it in Auto Focus Mode. Those few extra seconds allowed
me to capture quite a few on-the-fly shots.
By the way, we do some 8 or 10 of these live
workshops every year. Everyone has a great time and learns a lot and everybody
always comes away with some amazing photographs. If you’re interested in
attending, please check out the schedule on Blair's website at
www.blairhoward.com.
Blair Howard
is a professional photojournalist
www.blairhoward.com and chief creative officer and instructor of digital
photography at www.AIOPonline.org.
This article is copyright
© Blair Howard 2006. All rights reserved. You can
reprint this article for free but you must retain the internal links and the
credit line at the bottom of the article intact.
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