Quote:
Originally Posted by DRDavenport
You are SO right. Any camera that cost more than $100 should flash red and yell "Do you REALLY want to do this?" if autofocus is enabled.
DR
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They do, actually. On his Canon DSLR, he would have seen little red squares flashing in the viewfinder to indicate where the camera was planning to focus. This is the default mode, because it's easy / theoretically helpful for beginners. The camera chooses what it thinks the best focus point in the scene is. The problem is that in quite a number of his pics, those little red squares were nowhere near his subject (this is clearly visible by loading his photos into PhotoME).
The secret is knowing that if you switch the focus mode to "Single Point AF" (in Canon-ese), you can force the camera to always use a particular point of your choosing. Every camera is different in how this works, even among Canon DSLRs, so it requires a quick look in the book to see how to set it up. Once this is done, you prevent the camera from making any bad decisions and ruining your uppies. And as I mentioned previously, but is worth repeating, while you can select any of the available focus points (each model has a different number, the more expensive models having significantly more), the center point is almost always a much higher quality / precision, so that's the one you want.
Some of the cameras made in the last few years have an additional mode called face detect. And while this can be great for shooting friends & family, it's not at all good when you are trying to shoot uppies, thus it should be disabled.