mdelevie
Established
gareth said:If you are using a basic autofocus camera with a kit lens it can be frustrating, particularly in low light. The other reason that people can find it frustrating, and can't get it to do what they want, is they don't understand it and don't know how to use it. Sometimes I think auto-focus was miss-named. You have to be in full control of the auto-system to get the best out of it.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Gareth. For sake of clarification, I'm certainly not using a kit lens or a 'basic' autofocus camera. I'm using very fast primes (50/1.4, 85/1.2, 200/1.8) and pro-quality f/2.8 zooms (24-70L, 70-200L) in a Canon 20D or 5D.
While I find AF extremely useful for sports in strong light, I dislike it at other times. Maybe an example would help: I've lost frames of a bride & her father walking down the aisle due to poor servo AF tracking. In but a few steps they might be halving their distance to the lens, and in low light the camera can get lost hunting for the right focus. This is an important shot, and it's hard enough to capture flattering moments without worrying about my AF tracking poorly. This is a textbook scenario for using servo AF; with a moving subject, one-shot AF wouldn't do. That's just one example that comes to mind.
I admit that perhaps a screen with a split-image focus assistance would help with manual focus on these cameras. In the case of the 20D, the viewfinder image is pretty small, and it's hard to focus 'by eye' in low light on a plain matte screen. What looks sharp in that tiny viewfinder might not look sharp on an 8x10 print. (Infrared or ultrasonic AF would be perfect in this application)
BTW, the revolutionary features of the T90 (to me, anyway) go beyond the comfortable ergonomics and the control wheel. The big deal is that most settings are made via software, the control wheel is just the input device. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the multi-point spot metering and highlight/shadow exposure controls on the T90. (which, according to wikipedia, were copied from the Olympus OM-4) The T90 also introduced the 'program' mode, where after deciding upon the exposure, one can trade-off aperture versus shutter speeds. Brilliant!
BTW, I think of a Canon F1N or a T90 as a 'professional' camera, whereas the AE-1 was definitely a consumer camera. Today's camera offerings reproduce this market segmentation: there are plenty of consumer cameras and some very nice professional ones. I currently use a 20-year-old T90... will a Canon 300D still be usable in 20 years?
Regards,
Mark