More focus practice
December 30th, 2021
I spent some more time today practicing getting better at taking more consistently sharp pictures. My keeper rate was even better today. There are several change I made to my process that contributed to this increase in keeper rate.
I started by changing Servo Focus to Single Focus. My thought was that by doing this it would cause less of the slightly out of focus images following the first shot. Unfortunately the fast moving birds would still have the out of focus later images. There was a better keeper rate but not enough.
I decided to see if the pause between shutter press and the picture capture might be contributing. I am still unsure but the results where much better so there certainly something that is much better. The Canon R5 has several shutter settings including Mechanical, Electronic 1st Curtain, and Electronic.
Mechanical is a traditional shutter that must move out of the way to take the shutter thus creating a 80 millisecond delay. I am used to the sound of the shutter when I take pictures as far back as my film days in the first 15 years of my photography experience. I have been using the mechanical shutter up to now because of the familiar. Unfortunately it was definitely contributing the delays enough to reduce my keeper rate.
Electronic 1st Curtain is a compromise between electronic and mechanical. You get the sound of the mechanical and a faster frame rate. I used it yesterday to increase my keeper rate and it helped but it wasn’t enough.
I experimented with Electronic before and didn’t continue to use it. I found the large number of frames that I took to be a challenge to sort through. There is also no shutter sound. Both of these were deal killers before. When I saw a VLOG where the speaker mentioned the flashing of the borders when pictures were taken, I decided to try it again. The results were much improved.
