More Full Auto Practice

In this chapter, we’ve covered a lot of technical and practical details that are essential
to understand if you want to be able to use your camera quickly and effectively.
Often, quick use of the camera is what makes the difference between
capturing a “decisive moment” and getting a boring shot.

In the next chapter, we’re going to start getting more technical about basic photographic
theory, but before we go there, you might want to take some time to
do a little more practice in Full Auto mode. Shooting in Full Auto does not mean
you’re a photo wimp. The canon eos 500D in Full Auto mode is a very powerful instrument,
and having the camera decide technical details for you can free you up
to focus on composition and content. We’ll be discussing composition in more
detail in Chapter 8, but here are some exercises to try right now, before moving
on to the next chapter.

Work with Fixed Focal Length

Zoom lenses can make you lazy. They tend to encourage you to stay in one place
and compose from there. As we’ll see later, there can be a great difference in images
shot from different locations. But zoom lenses also keep you from having to
visualize a scene for a particular framing. Here are three quick exercises that will
get you seeing and thinking in a different way:

Full wide Zoom your lens out to full wide and leave it there! Spend a few
hours shooting with it at full wide. Don’t zoom the lens. Instead, reposition
yourself if you need to frame the shot differently. Be aware that you may not
be able to visualize or recognize potential scenes when limited to this one focal
length. So, if you think you see something even remotely interesting, look
at it through the camera. You don’t have to shoot it, but often when you look
through the camera, you’ll see a potential shot that you didn’t recognize when
you were looking with the naked eye.

Full tele Now do the same thing as the previous exercise, but this time zoom
your lens to its longest focal length. In other words, zoom in all the way. Spend
some time shooting as before. No zooming!

30mm On the canon eos 500D, a 30mm lens has the same field of view as a 50mm
lens on a 35mm camera. This also happens to be roughly the same field of
view as your eye. Consequently, a 50mm equivalent lens is considered a “normal”
lens. Some of the most famous, celebrated photos of all time have been
shot with a 50mm lens. The great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
worked exclusively with a 50. If it’s good enough for him, the rest of us should
be able to manage.

Set your camera on 30mm and spend a few hours shooting. Again, don’t
zoom! Some Canon lenses show a dot on the zoom ring to indicate where
normal is.

Obviously, with prime lenses—that is, lenses that don’t zoom—you get this type
of shooting experience all the time. These exercises are a way for you to learn
some of the advantages (and disadvantages) of shooting with a fixed focal length
lens.


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