5 Nov. 2010

Lesson 6 - Regaining Focus

Do you remember the assignment where we were asked to play around with manual focus, and I got all depressed? That's because we didn't really know enough about focus way back then (all of 2 weeks ago). Today we found out there are ways of getting good focus (and blur) in your exposures
without actually shifting to MF mode.

With all the other womens' cameras (you know the sexy SLRs with fancypants lenses that I lust after), there is a switch that flicks between Auto and Manual Focus mode. On my camera the focus is automatically automatic unless you manually switch to manual. Let's assume one is happy in AF mode (yes, this one is). If we leave our focus here, we can still guide it to perfection. There are AF settings within AF, and they are for single shot or continuous. In simple Sarah words, single is for when you have a still subject, and continuous is for when you don't.

There is also a AE (auto exposure) lock, and AF (auto focus) lock function, where even if the light changes (this is assuming you are in a cheat mode like AV or TV, where this would force the camera to auto-correct) or you or your subject move positions, the settings of exposure and focus will remain locked until you half-press the shutter again. Zahra had to explain this to our imbesilic group (sorry girls, really just talking about myself here) about a hundred times before we still didn't understand it, and the I realised my camera doesnt have this function so I gave up.

As I gave  up and got distracted, I found the Macro button. This is when you want to get SUPER close to your subject and still get focus. Man, was I going to have fun going macro later.

Then we played around with our "frame", the square in the middle of our viewfinder that designates the focal point (and concerning other functions, the camera regards this as where the action happens). We can move this around to help out camera focus in the position we want. This is where I gave the other girls camera envy - in the SLRs this was only able to be moved around 9 positions, but my camera allows total free-flow, AND I can adjust the size. Bam! One point back to me and my semi-automatic weapon.

goin' macro