For noobs: Stupid mistake...focus problem

If you are like me and will make every stupid mistake unless read about (and even then) you will appreciate this experience:

Yesterday I struggled the whole day (cold and rainy) with my focus. The lens kept buzzing and adjusting in fits and starts. I changed lenses, bought a rubber to clean electric contacts, cleared settings, took out batteries, etc. I tried everything I could think of.

Only when back home, while checking everything again, I realized that I had inadvertently set AF to AI Servo.

This ruined a lot of pix that should have been junk on their own merit.

How many more of these yet to do?

Ah ha was this an accidently managed to get it on SERVO by bashing the controls with your nose or where you playing around with it the night before?

You are not alone......

Once spent an hour or so taking shots in local woodland. Returned home to find the memory card sat on the desk

'shoot w/o card' is best left set to off

Probably the nose would have got a better result . I was actually changing drive to continous without looking at the LCD.

Funny!

runninmann wrote:
Funny!

Have learnt to live with it.

Gungnir wrote:
You are not alone......

Once spent an hour or so taking shots in local woodland. Returned home to find the memory card sat on the desk

'shoot w/o card' is best left set to off

Yeah. I took a lot of shots of a cardinal from last weekend without the CF card in the camera.

What exactly IS the purpose of the "Shoot w/o card" setting, anyway?

It's for when you've connected the camera to your PC/Laptop, save straight to your computer.

When I first got my camera my lense had MF selected, I was clueless. Mind you it made me 100x happier with the results when I selected found AF

I left mine in AI Servo after shooting a football warm-up session on the weekend. Took me by surprise today when I tried a few shots in the garden.

I have now just turned off my "shoot with/out CF card" Thank you! LOL

I've never had mine on. I was thankful I keep the 1GB card in my backpack all the time... Am 100 miles from home now and only have the 1GB card... my 2GB is in my comp at home... grrr. Was in a hurry when I left.

But at least I can take photos and have access to dump them onto a computer.

shoot w/o card is fun though. i've taken out the card and blasted away several hundred pics to fool people who get pissed off at my "monstrosity" of a camera (only xt+grip+70-200, i don't want to imagine what people think of a 1d+400mm f2.8). best part, none of the shots count towards your tally (go ahead and try, if you shoot 100 pics w/o card from img_0001, when you take a pic with card, it'll be img_0002

i use only a 1gb card, but i've taken several hundred raw images on it in a single day without access to a computer. for the price of what a 4gb extreme costs, i got myself 40gb and a 3.8in screen to boot. the p-series is the best purchase i've made besides my camera and the 70-200IS.

"shoot with/out CF card" I had that happend to its turn off, I had the button on my 30D in the middle position and couldn't changed settings, AI servo..etc...I think all of this things has happend to all of us at one point or another.

looking on the positive, I've at last stopped taking pictures with the lens cap on