A. Focus screen optimized for brightness rather than accuracy.
B. Focus on the lens loose so the AF motor does not have to be too big, rather
than optimized for smoothness and accuracy by hand.
C. Viewfinder image of low magnification.
And yes, I know that the newer cameras are a lot better than the older ones. It
is now a little annoyance rather than a lot of annoyance, but it is still an
annoyance.
One of the things is that many folks do not actually know how to focus a camera
quickly and accurately, it is easy to learn if someone who knows how shows you
but not easy to learn from reading unless one is really good at translating
written words into physical skills. To those folks AF must seem a god send. The
thing is when you do it yourself you know exactly what you want to focus on.
Yes advanced AF systems let you chose focus points. Canon has those nifty 45
point eye controlled focus systems. But then you have to train the camera to
follow your eye and they do not work 100%. The same amount effort will let you
do it yourself without thinking about it.
Exposure is the same way. "I select aperture priority, or shutter priority instead of
worrying about exposure". In normal lighting conditions you set your exposure, period.
If you want to control DOF you adjust to aperture setting, for motion you adjust to shutter
setting. There is nothing extra to think about. P&S have all these modes portrait,
scenic, etc that set up the camera for situations that with a bit of experience you do not
even need to think about. All kinds of things to make it easy for idiots (see my tag line).
If you are serious how long will you be ignorant of such things? Not long I think, soon you
are an expert. But the training wheels are still there.
It becomes one of those things where you fiddle with the camera instead of
taking the picture. Sure you have to learn, that is work, but it takes the same
amount of work to learn which feature to turn on when and once you do you only
know how to operate that particular camera. The general motor skills we are
talking about transfer to any camera that does not insist it is smarter than
you are.
The thing is, as Shel and others are trying to say, that once you have those
skills the camera insisting that you prove you want to do what you want is an
annoyance not a convenience.
graywolf
http://www.graywolfphoto.com
"Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof"
-----------------------------------
Kostas Kavoussanakis wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Graywolf wrote:
fight the camera. It is not as simple as just turning off AF, for
instance, every AF camera I have ever tried to us has had its manual
focus use compromised by the changes made to the design for the AF to
work at all.
What cameras would these be (are we talking SLRs here?) and how?
Thanks,
Kostas
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