Pixiq

Cartier-Bresson once said (don't ask me where) that he could tell by looking at how a person handled their camera whether they were a good photographer or not.

I wouldn't go that far, but there are a few giveaways for street photographers, and the first one is just so simple: do you have your lens cap on?  If you are using a lens cap, then you get knocked down a few levels in my book.  All your lenses should have a U/V filter, and that's it.  Remember, I'm not talking about wedding photography, or commercial photography, but the sort of shooting that comes up to surprise you.

But another important, and more complex factor is how your camera is configured.  HCB didn't need to deal with this.  Pick your shutter speed and f-stop, or your hyper-focal distance; and that's about it.

Today's digital slr has hundreds of possible combinations in terms of a preliminary setup.  So I thought this would be a good place to talk about how my Canon dslr is normally setup.

I say Canon DSLR because that's the line I've bought into.  I go back to the Canon AE-1, through the Canon Digital Rebel, the 40D, a few other cameras, and now I'm mostly with the Canon 550D and I'm sure that if this post lasts for a few months I'll be using something else - I have my eye on the Canon 60D.  I am not a camera tester, and since my living is made from what I shoot while walking around the city - I'm never using high-end digital cameras, but I do buy into a line of cameras, and view them as disposable, or at least replaceable.

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Students have often been surprised to see how my Canon 40D is configured – so I thought I’d go through it here in detail. (Again - written when I was using the 40D.  Now I'm with the 550D, but the setup and rules are the same).

1. Always shoot in RAW mode.  Please.  Don't tell me that you don't know what RAW is or that you don't need it.  If you have the least seriousness about photography (and why else would you be reading this) - get your manual out and learn how to shoot and process RAW files.  Please!

OTHER PERSONAL CHOICES

2. The LCD on the back of the camera is set to off.  You never want it turning on by itself while you’re shooting on the street for the obvious reason that it draws attention to you.

3. I have the LCD picture mode set to monochrome.  In the Canon dslr world it’s called “Picture Style” and it’s under the second camera icon on the menu.  The way my workflow is setup, the images although they are shot in color (Adobe RGB) as they are imported into Lightroom, I have a developer preset to grayscale.  So in most cases, at least in the beginning, I never see the images in color.

4.  I think that every dslr camera line has these shooting modes:

Program (program priority), AV (aperture priority), TV (shutter priority), and M (manual)

For street shooting, which is to say when you don’t know what you are going to be shooting next, I have each preset.  AV is set to F1.4.  TV(on a sunny day) is set to 1/1000th.  M (not set up).

White Balance is set to AWB (auto white balance).  I’m not going to be fiddling around with white balance while I’m walking around.

The Canon 40D (and later cameras in that line and the 500x line) have something called Highlight Tone Priority (with the 40D it’s under Custom Functions II – Image).  This is always set to ENABLE. 

SOME BACKGROUND, DSLR VS. SLR (FILM) CAMERAS

When shooting negative film, the rule of thumb was to expose for the shadows.  With negatives, if you didn't exposea silver pixel, then it wasn't exposed and you just were never going to bring it back no matter what you did.  The "negative curve" generally was forgiving at the top and you could get away with a stop or two of over-exposure.

DIGITAL CAMERAS - Be careful not to overexpose.  So this is the opposite of what we did with the film camera.  The DSLR captures a positive image.  Most common exposure issue with the DSLR - losing detail in the highlights.  And believe me, once they're gone - they're gone and you can't get them back again - no matter how many fancy tricks you know.  When I say you can't get them back again, I'm talking about looking at the image in RAW.  And if you can't get them back in RAW then they have gone poof. 

What does HIGHLIGHT PRIORITY do?  It gives me some leeway at the right end of the histogram.  It attempts to put more pixels into the highlight side and without this I find that it is too easy to lose highlights.  It has one possible downside – it doesn’t allow you to shoot at an ASA lower than 200.  Anything that can save me a blown highlight with a DSLR is worth using.  It's not only that the highlight contains no detail, but it seems particularly ugly.  At least with film, if you underexposed and ended up with a black area, you had a black area which is something... maybe you could turn it into a silhouette.  In some ways, it could be salvaged.  But the blown highlight, whether in film or digital - it's just something that draws your eye towards it - only to find there's nothing there.

Ansel Adams has a line in his Autobiography where he complains (and shows) a portrait of a miner in strong contrast light, and the shoulder is blown out, and he still complains, twenty years after the shot about not being able to do anything with that blown highlight.

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I have one lens (generally) the Sigma 30mm f1.4  (If I have a particular project in mind, then I may bring other lenses along) but this is just about the normal walking around mode.

The idea with pre-setting the AV and TV modes is that the camera remembers how they were set and I can quickly turn from a low-light shot to a quick moving shot with a turn of the dial.  Example might be, I’m on the way to pick up groceries and walk into the dimly lit store.  I’ll simply turn the switch to AV and I know that I’m in the ballpark.

On a sunny day, the city turns into a grid of shadow and brightly lit streets.  If I’m on the sunny side of the street I’ll leave the camera in Program mode.  I know it will give me a high enough shutter speed to capture moving things.

If I’m on the shady side of the street I’ll set the camera to TV.  I want to make sure that I have enough shutter speed to freeze motion.

Any sort of noise reduction settings are off.  I want to get as pure an image from the RAW file as possible.  I can always use noise reduction in Lightroom if it’s needed, which is very rare.

What else?  Oh, on the Canon you can configure focus lock to be triggered by the little AF-ON button on the back (what this is called is specific to the Canon 40D but Canon has had this feature since film camera days).    On the 40D, what this button is used for can be configured under the Custom Functions IV menu.  The camera is configured so that exposure readings are triggered by the Shutter Button and focus lock by that AF-ON button.

I only use the center focus point to pre-focus and then hold the button on the back; or if it’s going to be a long time and I don’t want to kill the batteries I’ll flip the lens to manual focus (and hopefully remember to set it back).

I can count the times I’ve put the camera into rapid fire mode on one hand.  Even if I was shooting sports I doubt if I’d use it.  To me, the thrill is still related to pressing the shutter button at the right time.  If I’m photographing a pitcher at a baseball game, I’ll be pre-focused on him, whether I’m using a super long lens or whatever – and try and anticipate the moment I want.

And I’ll tell you one other thing – although I need eyeglasses to drive, I never walk around with glasses on.  My eyes are good enough to see when something interesting is happening or about to happen, and I don’t really see things clearly until I look through the viewfinder where the diopter has been set for my eyes.  That’s about all I can think of.  I don’t know whether these custom functions exist on the other camera lines, but I’d guess they do.