Pixiq

It’s true photography is easier these days. That’s also the reason why there are so many “photographers”. A whizz camera packed with modes for everything and beyond, a Photoshop bag of tricks and a fashionable blog and you’re… a pro. I remember the days I had to go into the darkroom, the tight exposures on transparency film, the ISO limits and the manual focus lenses and I do agree we’ve come a long way. For the better and worst.

While more people now can find a way to express their art – and surely a lot of ideas have come through – digital photography also has it’s pitffals, and the worst of them is believing that cameras do all the work for you. They do work, but especially when situations are tricky they might let you down. And if you’ve believed in the camera makers mantra “press the button, we do the rest” (this is a Kodak motto from film early days reused here to another extent, really) you’re into trouble when an unexpected situation shows up in front of you. Cameras do not think, the intelligent part of a camera is always the photographer. Well, it should be...

These pictures are here to cut a long story short. They show what can happen if you leave the choices to the camera and, on the other hand, if you make your brain cells function and do the homework. The nice Chinese silhouettes are the result of an Auto mode (the Green rectangle) shot of a caterpillar (that next year will be a nice Papilio Machaon butterfly) and some common lavender flowers. They were shot as  examples of what can go wrong if you trust the Auto everything from a camera (in this case a Canon EOS 50D) and do not know how to work around the result.

The flower picture was difficult to shoot because the camera, in an intelligent move, could not define a point of focus, so it kept hunting until I managed to get a side AF sensor to “grab” one of the flowers. Not a very smart choice from the camera’s brain part. And although the flash did pop up – as the Green Mode always does, even for shots of the Moon at night – the “brain” opted to not use it, so the Chinese silhouette is perfect. Exposure made at 1/500 f/6.3. But that was not what I wanted.

To get my result I opted for using the camera in Manual (it’s there I feel more comfortable, but you can use any of the real intelligent modes, I mean Tv or Av on a Canon) and then to expose to darken the sky a bit, letting the flash take care of the rest. My exposure was done at 1/250 (the synch limit for the built-in flash) at f/14. I think you’ll agree this is more a picture than the first example.

As for the Papilio Machaon caterpillar, the situation is about the same. The Green all intelligent mode choose an exposure of 1/250, f/5.0 and did not bother with the flash. I had to tell the camera what I really wanted to do: so I switched to Manual and used an exposure of 1/200 at f/14, telling the flash to overexpose by 1EV. This was done so I could get a smaller aperture, to get enough depth of field, to get the swallowtail to be all in focus. Because the sky is so far back it’s always a diffused background.  Having the sky darker or lighter is a matter of taste here and I decided to have it darker, but you could have it lighter. You just have to know what to change and not let the camera choose for you. As I tried to show here, cameras do not think.

One final note: these pictures were taken with the pop up flash from the camera. Although I agree it is not the best light source you can have, I do think it’s there with a purpose and people should not shy away from using it. It’s not knowing how to use it properly that makes many people say it’s not a workable source of light. It does have it’s limitations, but for most people I think the hindering factor is more that they don’t know what to do with it.