Late Summer Car Show

Before setting out on my regular walk around town, I intended at first to load my Nikon F with the last of two rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 that I bought recently. But then I remembered that I’ve been wanting to get more practice with using some focus-related features that I recently discovered on my Canon EOS R8. With my Canon RF 50mm f/1.8 lens attached to my camera, I left the Nikon at home and ventured out with my Canon instead.

Upon being prompted by a friend who I happened to encounter by chance on the street, I was reminded that there was a classic car show going on today. This was my perfect chance to get some meaningful practice with camera features that I confess I am still getting the hang of even after having regularly used my R8 for the past eight months.

At the car show, there was no shortage of interesting subject matter to shoot.

Rather than photograph the same old same old yet again, it felt great to practice my shooting skills with some beautiful classic cars.

When I first got my R8, I was rather put off by its more advanced autofocus features, and I never bothered to learn more about them. But in recent days, I came across something I read online (I can’t remember exactly what it was) that prompted me to have a closer look at the online user guide.

Referring to the section on how to select an autofocus area, something I should have read more closely a while ago, I learned the differences among the various autofocus area types, how to switch from one to the another, and how to move the autofocus area to a particular region in my composition.

Before, whenever the camera’s whole-area autofocus picked the part of my composition that I did not intend to focus on, I would simply switch to manual mode. I find myself still doing that in certain situations. When I see a fleeting composition and need to focus quickly on something that I know the camera’s autofocus won’t grab hold of, I find that manual focus often works best for me. But when my composition is more static and I have more time to work my camera’s control buttons, I’m more inclined to let the camera’s autofocus achieve sharp focus on what I intended to be in focus.

Having revisited the camera’s user guide, I also became more adept with my camera’s manual focusing features. After having read the section on how to customize some manual focus functions, I realized that I could set the focusing ring direction to match that on all my old Nikkors, which I am very used to using and which are opposite to pretty much every other make of lens out there (turning the focus ring to the right gets you to infinity on a Nikkor lens whereas the opposite is true for every other lens I’ve encountered).

I also learned that I can set the sensitivity of the focus ring to rotation degree. The default setting is for the focus action to be sensitive to rotation speed, which is annoying to someone who is used to using old-fashioned lenses with physical helical focusers. I never liked the way it worked out of the box, and I hadn’t realized until just recently that I could set the camera to work in a way that is more comfortable for me.