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Spyder On... Equipment
A brief aside from my series on lighting.
The deeper I get into the subject of lighting the more I must refer to equipment, and there are some important things to say on the subject.
RTFM
All the equipment you buy new will have a manual. Read it.
No, really, read it.
There will be a lot of boring waffle that you don’t need to know, but there will be plenty in there that will make your life easier.
Long Boring Reviews
Most modern photographic equipment will have a technical review or 2 (or 5 or 6) both on the net and in camera magazines.
You should be reading these long before you buy your new equipment.
Whether you did or didn’t before you bought, now you have your bit of kit, read through every good review you can find (that is, every well thought out review that is written by someone who is not trying to sell one to you).
I would personally recommend http://www.dpreview.com for cameras, but only if you have already bought the camera, as they are still a site trying to sell you stuff.
These reviews will help draw your attention to features you may have missed as well as drawing your attention to the strengths (and occasionally weaknesses) of the kit you’ve bought.
Know your Gear
You’ve read the manual, you’ve read the reviews, now start testing for yourself.
A past student of mine (who’s story may appear in full in these articles) once asked me how I knew so much detail about the performance of the flash unit and camera I had brought along with me to a fashion shoot. The answer, which she couldn’t get her head around, was that I’d tested the equipment myself.
What ever the manuals or reviewers say, they weren’t using the exact bit of kit you just bought.
The classic example of this for me is my good old S2.
I’d read all about the in-camera colour settings from the manual (well I say all about, the S2’s manual is a sorely lacking affair) and read about the variation amongst the S2 cameras with regard to their colour and metering calibration in a number of reviews.
So by doing my bit of reading I knew that each S2 is very much an individual and I was going to have to test it very carefully if I was ever going to use it for a professional job.
Camera Testing
Without getting too nerdy, here’s a few of the tests I put my S2 through.
(BTW. I spent long hours testing and getting familiar with my S2, you don’t need to put in the big chunks of time I did with your equipment, you can span this process out for months as long as you DO get to know the equipment you’re using)
Auto Focus.
First by picking easy-to-focus-on objects at various distances and getting the camera to focus on them in a fairly random order to test the speed and reliability of the auto-focus, then choosing objects with fewer and fewer focusable points or marks on them to test how good the ‘lock-on’ was.
I gave myself about half a day just playing with the focus without ever taking a picture (my conclusion was that the auto-focus was a waste of time).
MASP settings.
I set up a daylight lamp, stuck the S2 on a tripod, metered a still life with a hand held light meter and went through the dial, first seeing if Program agreed with the light meter, then if it also agreed with Shutter and Aperture and finally seeing the results of a Manual setting at first the light meters reading, then the cameras.
I repeated this with high and low levels of light.
I found the S2 was fine in bright studio lighting, metered about a third of a stop to low at normal ‘day light’ levels and about two thirds of a stop low in low light.
Your camera probably will not have anything like this sort of meter variation, but I hope this shows how important it is to check.
In camera settings.
Finally, using the still life setup I’d done for the MASP tests, I went through each of the cameras settings for sharpness, tone, white balance and colour temp as well as the file compression and CCD settings until I had a photo for each and every setting combination for the camera (and a written list of the order in which I took them)
From this slow plod through, and a good few hours in front of the PC looking through the pictures and checking quality, I had a note of the best setting for quality vs. speed and file size, as well as a good idea of the range of effects I could get out of the camera.
I must point out that the range and quality was stunning, it’s the reason why my S2, rather than landing in the trash or going on ebay became one of my favourite cameras.
So after about 3 days testing I spent the rest of the week turning my notes into subconscious actions by going out and about with the S2, snapping away, getting used to the weight and feel of it and how it and I reacted to different lenses and conditions of use.
By the time it came to my first pro ‘gig’ using the S2, I could decide on settings and set them on the camera with hardly a second glance at it.
At this point I don’t want beginners to get scared. You don’t need to get to know your camera that intimately that quickly, I’m in a ‘live by the camera, die by the camera’ existence, for those of you who can still take pictures purely for the joy of it I’m sure you will get to know your camera that well, it just takes time.
Cameras are the complex end of photography, at least when it comes to becoming familiar with them and testing.
Everything else in you photographic arsenal still deserves your attention, from light meters to reflectors to flash triggers to tripods. Use them, get used to them, find out what they can do.
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