deronsizemore wrote in post #13246935
EXIF Data is above.
Thanks for the advice. Never thought about getting the tripod right down to the sand for a different perspective. For these shots, I had it at about knee height, so I had to get on my knees to look through the view finder.
So, a sturdy tripod. Mirror LockUp won't do much for a 30 sec. exposure. Two things that can help a lot are to turn off your lens IS (they tend to "drift" when on a tripod because it "winds down" and turns off). And then, using either a cable release, a wireless remote, or at least the self timer of the camera will cut down on camera shake from you pressing the shutter button.
EXIF data posted above.
I'll try AF tonight and focus on one of the buildings. I just didn't try last night because in my noobness, I was under the impression that AF just wouldn't work at night and I needed to set it to MF to infinity.
When you say "Get some practice with either using the center point to focus on the buildings and then recomposing with your focus lock" do you simply mean to just keep the shutter button pressed half way down while I recompose?
You can get the shutter lock by holding down the shutter button half-way as you recompose the shot or, after getting a focus achieved by swiching the lens to MF so you can recompose and get the shot without re-activating the AF.
One thing you mentioned, about your aperture being f/5 and f/7 -- well, for now, I'd suggest you stick with f/11. That will ensure that a good "range" of your image will be acceptably sharp, what we call a "wide Depth Of Field" (DOF). That way, not just the buildings but also a lot toward the forground will be "apparenly in focus".
Now, there is nothing wrong with the MF approach, and nothing wrong with setting the lens at infinity, the question is will this benefit you? Some scenes, sure, if you can't actually use the AF! But, in these two scenes, the buildings have both light and good detail, which are the things our AF looks for! and, since it is important for you to have them properly in focus, then it makes sense for you to catch them with your AF!
The other approach to the AF is to use an outer focus point -- the one that is either on a subject or close to the subject. I use them all the time, you just have to learn to work with them.
Or, one other thing you can learn to do is to go to Live View and, in Manual Focus, zoom the Live View all the way in and centered on the subject you want to focus on, and take your time to adjust the focus, wait for jiggling to die down, repeat, and then take the shot. To do this effectively, I'd start with a quick attempt to get a "reasonable" focus, so the distant subject is not just a blur, or, in this case yeah, you could start at Infinity. You do realize that in normal conditions Infinity is not at the Symbol but at the inverted "L"...?
