Oh, My, Goodness…
February 26th, 2008 by Jerry
I have been living in the Dark Ages of Ignorance for so long. Canon DSLR shooters, go here and watch this. Just.. watch it… (Sorry, Jen and Mark, this doesn’t apply to the 300D even with the “hacked” firmware – I tried.)
http://www.thebschoolblog.com/index.cfm?postID=57
So the old push-the-shutter-button-halfway-to-focus thing? There’s a whole different way to do this that I never even heard of before. On the cameras that support it, (Yay, my 400D/XTi does!) you can make it so the useless AE lock or * button (useless if you shoot mostly in manual exposure mode) acts as the auto-focus control. This removes all focusing features from the shutter button, and it only releases the shutter. Putting the AF mode into Servo, you can either hold down the back * button and focus continuously while shooting, or you can one-shot focus. Servo mode also lets the shutter release even when the camera thinks the focus isn’t set, so no matter what, the shutter button will always release the shutter. It will take a bit of getting used to, but I can see how this way of auto-focusing can be much easier to control and get the focus right more consistently.
(Note: I’ve read that at least a few Nikon DSLRs allow the same functionality, and who knows, maybe they had it first. No matter.)
And, the joystick focus-point-selection trick also works on the XTi. Want the left focus point active? Hit the left arrow key. Want to get it back to center quickly? Hit the Set button. It’s no eye-controlled focus, but even if I had ECF, I would use this method whenever I need the focus point to be set. It doesn’t let me use my Set button for image quality, like I had before, but I rarely shoot anything but raw these days.
Focus has been one of the big areas in my photography that I’ve tried to improve, so these hidden tools might help me out a bunch!