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Using the BURST
capability
Watercolour
©2009 Charlene Brown
Don’t you love it when an otherwise helpful article
or blog post about photography suggests you “refer to your camera’s instruction
manual”…? Don’t they know nothing has an
instruction manual anymore? What you get with a new camera is a DVD with a
downloadable owner’s manual of randomly-nested menus and sub-menus of
indecipherable icons and useless party tricks.
You can print out this worthless pile of pages if you want, but I can’t
imagine anyone wanting to if they’ve read more than about three of them and
discovered how ambiguous and repetitious they are.
Anyway, you don’t want a pile of pages. You want a quick
reference list of techniques to handle specific problems such as:
Dim lighting: Bad lighting often results in
wonderfully evocative photographs. Blurry evocative photographs, unfortunately.
If a tripod is out of the question there
are other possibilities, such as the sensitivity (ISO) setting…
Obstructed view: This too is usually a people problem,
like when you’re in the back row of something, but there are also landscape
photography situations when it would be nice to be about a foot higher, and you
can achieve this by holding your camera as high as you can... and using the
High Angle capability on your screen so you can actually see what you’re doing.
Fast-moving subject (or fast-moving photographer, as
in shooting from a car when the driver can’t even slow down, much less stop –
ie the reference shots for ‘Using the
BURST capability,’ above)
TMI: Too much information (for those not fluent in
Internet slang)… Happens when you’ve got a detailed subject in front of a
detailed background. You have to reduce your depth of field (wide aperture, lowest
f, low depth of field) so that only the subject is in focus.
To ensure that you can read and understand this list
quickly, you have to devise your own code. At the end of my next blog post, after
outlining a few more problem situations, I will list some examples in my ‘mode/number’
code, pertaining to all the situations I have described.
