SF Chronicle Day 08

I was just looking back at rhe blog entries and can't believe I missed two days without even noticing!  I really thought I had been posting every day, but I guess not... 

I can't believe it is already 8 days (and they have been 8 days in a row).

Tomorrow will be my ninth back-to-back day and the last one.  I already have 3 stories assigned to me.  The first will have me leaving at 8:30 in the morning and my last assignment ends at 7:30 p.m. in Berkeley.... Then I have to file the photos and find my way home.  I'll be home after 9p.m.

I counted today, and so far I have shot 7 stories, and by the end of the day tomorrow it will be a nice round 10!

On Monday I got a car and some gear. 

I had my first panic attack when I could not get the Chronicle gear to auto focus.  Luckily I still had my gear in the car, so I ran back and switched out the gear.

It turns out that the Chronicle bodies had been set to back button focus, which I have never used.  I am getting mixed responses of other photogs about using that function.  I figure it is not a bad idea to try to learn a new technique, and I shot that way today with mixed results.  Most people say it is faster, and maybe it is, but I had a lot of out of focus shots.

For those who have never used back button,  basically instead of the half click to focus and full click to release the shutter,  you press a button on the back of your camera to auto focus and then fire away.  The idea is that each time you pull the shutter release, the camera re-focuses.  With back button, you focus once and can make many exposures with that same focal point.  HOWEVER...  if your subject moves between the first and second exposure, then they may be out of focus.  ALSO... if you move they may be out of focus.  With the shutter release as the focus, it takes the camera another fraction of a second to refocus, but... atleast your shot won't be soft.

I think there may be a time and place for this technique, maybe for sports when there is enough depth of field and a specific player stays within the boundaries of the critical focus (an at bat baseball player for instance). 

But dark places where you are shooting wide open and hand held, the movement is too great and the the depth of field too shallow to keep each shot in focus without letting the camera refocus.

That is my take on it.  I plan to shoot a few more assignments with the back button focus settings to see if i can find another advantage that I have not yet seen.  If nothing, then I'll reprogram the bodies back to shutter release/focus.

So the image I leave with you today is a shot I took with my phone while filing photos from the car.  After an assignment,  many times we need to file the images right away.  So I filed my images in the shade of a little residential neighborhood in Redwood City today.