Personalizing Your In-Camera Tools
By Dale Scherfling
2 June 2007
Today's cameras come with all the bells and whistles, graphs and gauges imaginable - far more than most of us can ever master in a lifetime of trying. It's up to us to simplify and pick our way through those features to find the best combination for our own particular style of shooting. Over the years I've come to rely on these six favorite in-camera tools and I use them all the time. They do the job for me.
CENTER SPOT AUTOMATIC FOCUS POINT
I prefer a single red dot focusing aid, dead center in the viewfinder. This puts my focus right where I want it, most often on the face. It blinks when I'm on target and I know it's right. Purists often argue this point, insisting you should always compose in the camera without centering your subject but that's not the way I do it. I teach college photography and also stress the rule of thirds as a basic composition tool but I still like a little maneuvering room in postproduction. That's where I tweak and crop and fine-tune composition. Besides, I'm pretty comfortable using focus lock to both meter and focus so the center-weighted focusing aid is not a problem for me. Practice makes perfect.
CENTER-WEIGHTED SPOT METER
This goes hand-in-hand with red-dot focus - when you've got one, you've got the other - concentrating the best of the camera's metering strength at the most important area of the shot (about 3.5 percent of the viewfinder area). There are also center-weighted averaging features available on most of the better cameras, which also measures the selected 3.5 percent and then averages the entire scene.
Remember though - today's camera systems are good but not selective. You still have to make the decision on what and what not to shoot. If facial features are more important than action or body language, watch the lighting on the face BEFORE you press the button. Is the face in shadow or turned into the light? And if so, is that light too contrasty? Look for that open shade.
LCD MONITOR IMAGE-ENLARGEMENT
On-the-scene image magnification allows ongoing quality control monitoring. Check for sharpness, exposure and flesh/texture detail and make corrections and adjustments as you go. The effort you put into your shooting today saves time in postproduction correction tomorrow.
ISO CONTROL
This is more than a light-control tool. It is also a wonderful creative device, especially when using image magnification to check for details. Play with ISO, thumbing it up or down for best texture results. Rule of Thumb here (pun intended): Thumbs-up when you see patina, thumbs down when artifacts, muddiness or other distractions appear. If it enhances, it's good. If it distracts, not so good.
SHOOTING INFORMATION DISPLAY SCREEN
All kinds of interesting data here, for each and every shot at a single glance. There's histograms (watch those spikes and highlight blinkies), shutter speeds, apertures, plus and minus exposure compensation amounts, ISO speeds, color temperatures and white balances to help your on-the-spot adjustments and fine-tuning.
CREATIVE ZONE/AUTOMATIC ZONE
I use both sides of my mode dial freely, usually starting on the sports setting on the automatic side. The faster shutter speeds minimize camera shake and automatically controls most of the lighting conditions I'm likely to encounter as I move around in various locations. I like bukeh and selective focus effects but don't bother with a lot of adjustment settings to achieve them. I just move closer to the subject, either physically or by zooming, to throw the background out of focus. Needless to say, I prefer longer lenses for this.
When I go to the manual zone it is usually full manual. I'm either going for slower shutter speeds to blur or pan; playing with ISO to emphasize skin texture or patina; under-exposing to experiment with color saturation; or just plain limited by fading or difficult lighting situations. I am strictly an available light photographer and don't even own a strobe.
When I leave the automatic zone to go manual, I use the basic settings recorded from the shooting information display screen as my starting point and make my adjustments from there. So basically, the automatic zone does two major things for me: it handles exposure in ever-changing situations (so I can concentrate on shooting) and it serves as my light meter when I move from automatic to creative.
A final thought on creative versus automatic zones. For me, I use automatic when I'm shooting action, scene-setting or basic Saturday, Sunday, Monday sports page journalism. There my editors prefer REALISM. When shooting manual, I'm thinking more creatively and IMPRESSIONISTICALLY, going more for the 'feel' of the scene. These are things my editors like on the Sunday supplement pages, or on the Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday slower news days when not so much is happening in the sporting world. The BIG BOSS, who controls all our lives on the paper, is solid fan of realism in photography. But he also has a soft spot for impressionism at times.
"There's too damn much war and bloodshed in the world today," he says. "That's what they usually see on the front page. Give 'em some art now and then. It'll brighten their day."
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