What a
pleasure it was to meet and learn from Charlie Cramer in Zion National Park
last week. As it turns out, we have at
least one thing in common; back button focus.
Charlie is
one of those photographers who came up shooting medium and large format film
and has made the transition to digital very well. He’s a master at printing and digital
workflow and otherwise quite technically savvy as well.
So, what’s
back button focus? You may have noticed
that by default your DSLR camera is focused by using the shutter button. The problem with this is that metering
(determining the amount of light, or exposure) and focusing were accomplished
with the same button. Modern digital
cameras can be customized in many ways.
One of these moves the focus function to another button which is, you
guessed it, on the BACK of the camera and operated with your right thumb.
Why would
you want to make this change?
·
* As I mentioned, it uncouples focus from
metering. You might not want to focus on
the same part of your composition as you’d like to meter. There’s no need to maintain
the shutter button halfway down when you focus and recompose.
·
* You
can leave autofocus-enabled lenses set to autofocus. If you’re like me and like to manually focus
landscapes, the old system will refocus when you activate the shutter
button, if you happen to forget to flip that switch. That's unnecessary frustration.
·
* You
can set the focus mode on your camera to servo/continuous and leave it
there. That’s another setting that I don’t
need to remember to fiddle with. Just tap the button for single focus and hold
it for continuous.
The only
argument I've heard against this is that it’s hard to learn. Really?
The learning curve on this one is about 6 shots. I've noticed that I can't hand my camera over to just anyone but I'm pretty sure I don't want to do that anyway.
Tutorials
on making the change are easy to find.
End of
lesson.
Back to
the pretty pictures; here are some of my favorite images from the Zion
trip. The Rocky Mountain Maples at
higher elevations were resplendent and we had a delightful rainy day. More are at SkylineImages.net.