Ranger Adventure

[txpaulranger]

come back again.

[txpaulranger]

final. end.

[txpaulranger]

more action.

[txpaulranger]

hard to capture right moment.

[txpaulranger]

final pics.

[AndyR]

Just FYI Paul...

The reason your focus is all over the place, and many images the focus is just not where you want it to be:

It's because you are letting the CAMERA choose the focusing point. When shooting upskirts, you NEVER want the camera to choose the focus point, because the camera has no idea where the good bits are.

When shooting ups, you definitely want to choose the center focus point, & force the camera to only use this point (check the manual). Most cameras, especially Nikon & Canon DSLRs (like your Kiss X4) have a much higher sensitivity / accuracy on the center focus point, as well as being able to find contrast lines in both vertical & horizontal directions. This one simple change in the settings will save you a lot of heartache when you go out next summer. Nothing worse than getting home & realizing a ton of your hard fought pics have come out bad.

You might also consider bumping the shutter speed up a notch or two... 1/320th of a second is just barely enough when you have the lens racked all the way to 300mm, 1/500th would be safer if the light is good. Personally, I'd bump the ISO higher so I could keep the shutter speed higher. Anything up to ISO 1600 can be cleaned up pretty good in modern software noise reduction, maybe even 3200 on a cloudy day.

Freeware like PhotoME lets you check all your shooting data, including focus points, after the fact, if your editing software does not show this data.

[DRDavenport]

Originally Posted by AndyR

Just FYI Paul...

The reason your focus is all over the place, and many images the focus is just not where you want it to be:

It's because you are letting the CAMERA choose the focusing point. When shooting upskirts, you NEVER want the camera to choose the focus point, because the camera has no idea where the good bits are.
<snip>

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

[AndyR]

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

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.

[txpaulranger]

Thanks for great suggestions and information. I was wondering this focus point thing. I practice for upcoming season now.

[txpaulranger]

AndyR is so right. Those are what my camera had gone wrong in so many reasons.