Photography

I don’t like Canon’s Auto White Balance. I’m not saying that it’s wrong, I’m saying that I don’t like it. I usually like the light balance to be warmer.

1. There’s never an exact right white balance. Even when using a color meter, like the old Minolta or now Kenko’s.
2. White balance is the reading of the white color and adjusting everything around it. The problem is what’s the right white? An 87% white, a 92% white, or the 18% grey card?
3. CCD and CMOS sensors react differently by model and brand to the white balance. My Canon 7D is cooler than what I’m used to.
4. I know about the various contraptions for getting the “right” white balance like ExpoDisk…

I set my white balance to Daylight and that’s it! The colours are usually a little warmer and I will adjust if necessary in Lightroom, much less than ½ of the time. I don’t mess around with the white balance. RAW files are only affected by:

This setting is not what any “normal” person would think. It’s not about how quick the focus tracking is, it’s about what happens when there’s an interruption in the subject being tracked. What happens if something/somebody comes in front of the subject you are tracking? Does the autofocus keeps on tracking the old subject and tries to regain it or does it tries to focus on the new subject?

The AE Lock is the <*> button at the back. It’s between the AF-ON and the focus point select buttons. AE stands Auto-Exposure.

Basically, the AE lock is for measuring the light, locking the measurement in the camera, recomposing the photo, and finally taking the photo.

There are 2 kinds of photographers:

1. The aperture priority photographers
2. The shutter priority photographers

The manual photographers do not count, they are so rare that they are lobbying for being listed under the Endangered Species Act.

This week I finally had a long discussion, sometimes more than a discussion it was almost bordering on arguments, with an old friend. As usual between geeks we talked “geekhood” topics. He’s Nikon, I’m Canon. You can imagine the conversation: Mine’s bigger than yours. Mine’s better than yours… And don’t forget the mine’s more expensive than yours.

People always say: “If you want to know if you are exposing correctly, check the histogram and shoot to the right”.

What’s the histogram? The histogram is the graph representation of the tonal distribution of your photo, kind of. The histogram shows the number of pixels for each tonal value from 0 to 255.

Do you remember the movie the Karate Kid? The famous Mr Miyagi said:

Wax ON, Wax OFF!

— Mr Myiagi

Canon gave us the AF-ON, AF-OFF. What’s up with the autofocus off? The AF-OFF? What’s the purpose of the autofocus off? You can assign a button to the autofocus off with the Customization C.FN IV - 1.

Dead! I can’t focus with my “70-200”. What happened? Did the lens die? Did my Canon 7D die? I don’t know. But it’s dead and no auto-focus. The manual focus seems to be working. It works when “chimping” on the LCD. So it looks like it’s the auto part of the focus that doesn’t work.

I remember reading somewhere on a Canon’s official website, but not sure of which one, that the focus points are not exactly where the points are shown in the viewfinder. The auto focus sensors are supposed to be larger than the rectangles shown in the viewfinder.

Photo District News magazine wrote, in the Feb-2009 issue, an article on medium format cameras vs. high-res dSLRs cameras for professional photographers. I’d like to quote what David Prince, a Manhattan-New York based commercial photographer, said. David Prince uses mostly a Mamiya RB67 with a 39 Megapixels Phase One P45 digital back, he also uses a Canon 5D for scouting locations. He said: