Digital Camera tips and advice
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Abracadabra - Instantly Speed Up Your Digital Camera
Recently I was attending a birthday party for a one year old and as you might expect there was no shortage of digital cameras. It seemed each proud parent
came to the party armed with extra batteries and big memory cards. I always LOVE these kinds of gatherings because it provides the perfect opportunity to observe
how people use their digital cameras and to see if I can spot problem areas that would make a good how-to article for Digital Camera Tracker. With flashes
firing and people dodging here and there to capture the perfect birthday photo it didn't take long to see AND hear the BIGGEST complaint of the
evening. "Oops... I missed it!" "Stupid camera!" Just as a point of reference there was a full compliment of digital camera brands,
price ranges, and quality represented so this particular problem was not inherent to any particular digital camera. They were all equally blessed with -
SLOWNESS! To be more specific - slowness in a low light situation. Here's what I told the twenty plus digital camera shooters that
solved their slow camera problem and turned the rest of the evening into a successful photo shoot for each parent. Part of the problem is that most digital
camera owners don't run into the problem until they find themselves in this exact low light situation. I keep hearing comments like, "That's weird, it wasn't acting like
that yesterday." Even the people with the $400 point-and-shoot cameras had that bewildered and confused look on their faces. I had the hostess get every
one's attention and then I asked if everyone who thought their camera was acting slow would raise their hands. Pretty much everyone raised their
hand. I then asked if they would be interested in solving the problem and making their cameras behave? Once again everyone raised their
hands. So we had a two minute "Speed Up Your Digital Camera" lesson right there on the spot. Everyone had a blast! It wasn't so much that the cameras
were misbehaving it was more a matter of understanding why they were behaving differently and specifically how to correct the problem. Talk about having
every one's undivided attention. Now I did not launch into a full blown technical explanation about boring things like shutter lag, preliminary metering flash,
and low-light focusing aids, after all, for pete's sake, it's a kids birthday party. All I said was that when you go into low light the number of things your cameras needs
to do just take longer. It's a problem for the most part you never notice in normal light situations. Here's how we're going to fix the
problem. Everyone locate the flash setting button on your camera. On most digital cameras the flash setting button typically has something that
looks like a lightning bolt. Okay when you press your flash button on most cameras your choices will be Flash Off - Flash Auto - Flash On. Everyone set your cameras
to Flash On. Basically all this means is the camera does not need to take any time to decide if it needs to use a flash or not, Flash On means is will fire the flash for
every picture until you turn it to another setting. Having the camera decide whether the auto flash is needed adds to slow low light performance and missed
pictures. Now for the MOST important tip. Everyone hold your camera up like you're going to take a photo.
BLAM!
All of a sudden there were twenty plus photos of me. :)
I explained that the blinking light meant their cameras brain was trying to figure out correct exposure and focus and the lower the light the more time the cameras brain would take to figure things out.
But life does not stand still and wait for our cameras to figure things out.
Do you know that every single person in the group knew about holding the shutter button half way down before they took their photo? Somewhere along the line they had read or someone had told them about this digital camera trick.
However!
Not one person knew about waiting for the blinking (digital camera brain light) to stop blinking before they could take a picture.
What they were doing is holding the shutter button halfway down and then taking their picture. But then they were getting upset when there was a latency between when they finally pressed the shutter button and when the camera would actually fire.
Once they knew to wait it became a simple matter of timing, which every single one of them mastered almost immediately.
We now had a room filled with very happy digital camera owners.
I've seen a lot of the photos from the birthday party and what a HUGE quality improvement between the ones prior to our our little photo tip session and the ones taken after.