Re: Photo help - last night @ PLP

[Greg Triplett <triplett@hotkey.net.au>]

Hi David

>>95% of railway photography will work fine in Automatic Exposure.  40% will work
with Automatic Focus.  The first thing to do when buying a
new camera is to turn
the autofocus off.<<

I don't agree with that. The first thing to do is learn how
to use the camera properly.

There's no reason these days with gear like the EOS or
Pentax that railway photography shouldn't be 100% auto
exposure and 100% autofocus so long as you manage it
correctly.

Auto exposure will only be dead right when you develop a
ferw rules as to what you want out of the frame and how the
camera will react to various lighting conditions. The camera
will be fooled accasionally and you should make notes of
what you did and the conditions so that you can apply some
exposure corrections next time. Also the camera is not
clever enough to know what you want out of the scene in
terms of exposure and hence more rules and intervention is
required. Having developed a set of exposure correction
rules for the various conditions these can be applied and
the camera run at 100% autoexposure in the field. If still
in doubt use a motor drive bracket of 3 exposure. Can't
miss.

With the crack sharp autofocus systems in today's cameras
there no reason why autofocus shouldn't be used all the time
with one exception ( shooting through wire mesh ). You must
prefocus on a point along the track just like in the old
manual focus days and shoot accordingly. However if you
change you mind it is very quick to refocus on a different
spot. The modern autofocus system is so quick that it is
quicker than manually  focussing. 

Do not try try to autofocus on an approaching train. It will
all happen too quickly to focus, recompose and fire. Always
focus on a stationary point in advance of the train arriving
in the scene.

Regards

GT