Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
the digital SLR camera has got all sorts of tools on it to help you focus, they're called
auto focus modes unfortunately manufactures haven't yet standardize
what they call all these different things even though they all do pretty
much the same thing.
On my Nikon for example i have continuous,
single and manual mode to control how the actual focusing bit is done.
I can and it'll be cool auto intelligence server or something like that.
You're just gonna have to get your book out and
look up auto focus modes and that's where you gonna find how to control
your camera.
But actually what they do is pretty much the same on all of them. So let's start at
the beginning,
if you've just bought a digital SLR camera there's a pretty good chance
it's going to be on fully automatic focus now
that's okay but the trouble is the camera doesn't know what you want in focus and
what you don't,
let me show you what I mean, on the back here this
set of buttons here this tells me, this allows me to tell the camera
where I want
the camera to focus what area in the screen I want to use
if you're on fully auto which is that top one here
the camera is completely in charge. Now I've got some leaves up here
here we go, they're beautifully back lit and i'm going to take a picture of these
leaves, small in the view finder
using the building on the other side of the plaza, to,
as a background now if i try and focus
yeah straight away
the camera is focusing on the building it doesn't know that i want these little leaves which are
quite small, in the left hand corner of the picture
to be the subjective of the shot, it thinks i want that great big building over
there which I don't.
Now how do you control that, what do I do about it?
If you flick into the dynamic mode, as it's called on the Nikon,
this means I can choose a little dot inside the viewfinder
and I can roll that dot around the viewfinder by using this
multi-directional button on the back of the camera and I can see through the
viewfinder
it moving around all over the place so I can choose where to put it.
Now i'm going to chose the spot up in the top left hand corner because that's where
my leaves are.
The camera will look at that little spot, look at that cluster of points around it
and that's where it'll focus, so let's go back to my leaves,
let's put the dot on the leaf, bam.
Straight away my leaf is in focus
and the building behind is all soft and out of focus, which is what i wanted to
achieve.
There's another very similar area focus mode
called single point, that's the one at the bottom, down there.
Very much the same as the dynamic i can chose a point and i can move it around the
viewfinder
but instead of it auto focusing on that cluster of points around the one
like it does in dynamic
it only focuses on the point that i have chosen.
great for pinpoint accuracy in a portrait or something I could use it on my
leaf.
Thing to be careful with whenever you do this
is not to move, you need to focus your camera and take the shot straight away
because if you focus and then you wait for a minute you could
just rock backwards and forwards, only that much and particularly with a close up
you're gonna blur your own picture, you're gonna knock it out of focus.