High end professional cameras are all about options and control. The camera gives you options and you take control. Over time, the choices you learn to make translate into your award winning photos.
CJ teaches everyone this one basic lesson…Always Control Something. That means never ever ever ever shooting your expensive camera in Auto. Here is how I learned that lesson…
CJ and Nick took me out on the active lava field in the middle of the night for a photo shoot. I was new to high end photography…brand new. I had no idea what I was doing. They had given me the basics but the pressure of the situation was such that I waited until they turned their backs and I turned the camera on to the Auto setting…because I really could not figure it all out on my own. Guess what…I got a really nice shot…nice enough that they got very excited about it when I showed it to them in the back of the camera. To hell with learning the camera…this Auto setting rocks. Hey…it was a double cheat, because they insisted that I use a tripod and I fooled them on that as well…shot it hand held…because I have such a steady hand.
Fast forward to later that same day. CJ called me and asked me to send him that shot…he wanted to print it for the gallery even though I really was not part of the gallery at that point…a major break through for me. By then I had edited it on my computer. I could not understand why it did not look like the image did on that one inch screen on the back of my camera. It was so grainy that it almost looked like an abstract painting…and not a very good abstract painting. What the heck happened? I checked the speed that Auto chose…looked pretty good at 1/40th of a second (actually way too slow for exploding lava while shooting hand held, but I did not know that then), the lens was wide open at f/2.8 and that made sense to me (but I did not realize that would put only a small part of the image in clear focus)…so what could be wrong? I eventually found the ISO setting that Auto had chosen. I asked CJ if ISO 25,600 was a good choice on my old Canon 20D camera. Yeah…turns out that is not a good setting for ISO…not even remotely a good setting. It left the already blurry image filled with sensor noise and grainy as heck. Lesson learned. When CJ learned the facts he told me that he could not print that image any bigger than 3 inches by 2 inches and that there was very little call for that size in their gallery…so much for my false start as a professional photographer.
In the next article I will give you some basics on what you can control with your terrific new camera and why you want to want to take control of something…or everything. Aloha.
And…ps…when I get a chance I will try to find that image I took way back when at 25,600 ISO to show you what a hot mess looks like…may get to that later today and will update this blog if I find it.