Chapter Seven: Advanced Features
Shooting with Live View
This is probably the most straightforward implementation of shooting with the LCD monitor that I’ve come across. The justification for Live View is the ability to use that large, sharp LCD monitor for composing a photograph rather than using the comparatively tiny image the viewfinder is able to present. A fringe benefit of having Live View on the camera is the ability to connect the camera to a computer and use the Canon EOS Utility software to remotely control many of the functions of the camera.
Be sure the Live View shooting/movie shooting switch is set to Live View, then press the START/STOP button. You should now be looking at the image created by the camera, with a white-bordered rectangle measuring approximately 1/2” x 3/8” that is the magnifying frame. For Live mode and face detection Live mode of auto-focus, its center is also the focus point. (In Quick mode, the magnification frame remains to help you identify the portion of the image you wish to magnify, but the shape of the focus point will depend on your selection of the AF area, and can be separately positioned.) When you press the shutter button halfway, the lens will attempt to focus. If it’s successful, the rectangle becomes green bordered. To achieve optimal focus, press the magnify button to increase the image size 5x; press the magnify button again, and the magnification goes to 10x (pressing it a third time returns the magnification to 1x). Of course, any image capture will be at a magnification of 1x, regardless of what may be set for the LCD monitor’s display.
The metering mode is set to evaluative for all Live View image captures. If you’re using any of the continuous shooting options while in Live View, the exposure determined for the first shot will be applied to the subsequent shots in the series. The LCD monitor uses a great deal of battery power, so when in Live View, you will want to watch the remaining charge level a bit more closely than usual. A fully charged battery is expected to provide power for approximately 200 photos in Live View.
Live View can be disabled. If it has been, open the SHOOT4 menu to enable the Live View Shooting option.
Since the LCD monitor is busy displaying the current composition, the monitor’s screen is not available for the normal Quick Control button’s display or the normal INFO. button’s display. However, if you press the INFO. button several times, you will see that there is a circular path of displays available, with the original display showing nothing but the composed image and the rectangular focus point, the next display overlaying the first with a minimal amount of exposure data, the third display giving yet more shooting information, and the fourth display adding a brightness histogram. The fifth display replaces the histogram with the electronic level. Pressing the Quick Control button while in Live View gives you access to the Auto Lighting Optimizer option, memory card selection, recording function, and image-recording quality.
Here’s a good graphic that I borrowed from the camera’s Instruction Manual, which covers everything (except for the electronic level) that can be displayed as a result of pressing the INFO. button several times.
Figure 7-1. Live View’s INFO display
Silent Shooting
During “normal” shooting, you can significantly diminish the mechanical sounds of the camera during an exposure by choosing either silent single shooting or silent continuous shooting from the Drive mode selections. Though silent continuous shooting often slows things a discernible amount, you will probably never be aware of any slowing while in silent single shooting (notice that there is no silent high-speed continuous shooting).
Figure 7-2. Quick Control screen
Figure 7-3. Drive mode settings
Silent LV Shooting
Silent Live View shooting is a feature unique to Live View, and is controlled by the Silent LV Shooting option on the SHOOT4 menu. As you might infer from the name of this option, its purpose is to reduce the amount of noise associated with mirror and shutter movement. There are three choices, with Disable being one of them. The other two will both diminish the mechanical sounds. The difference between them is that Mode 1 allows you to use continuous shooting, even high-speed continuous shooting, whereas Mode 2 forces single-shot exposure even though the camera has been set to continuous shooting and you’re holding the shutter button down. If either Mode 1 or Mode 2 is set, and a Canon external flash is attached, silent Live View shooting is ignored. If either Mode 1 or Mode 2 is set and a non-Canon external flash is attached, that flash will not fire. Set the variable choice to Disable in order to fire a non-Canon external flash while in Live View. (Don’t confuse this menu option with the Silent Control option on the SHOOT5: Movie menu.)
Figure 7-4. Silent LV Shooting option
Continuous Shooting
Continuous shooting describes the act of pressing the shutter button and holding it down, allowing the camera to continuously record images, within certain constraints. Few of us were able to afford the luxury of continuous shooting in the days of film-based SLRs. Most of us could only hope to shoot 36 exposures in a fast-moving series, so our risk was generally limited to a few dollars. With DSLRs, we are not limited by the length of a roll of film, but primarily by the capacity and data-transfer speed of the memory cards we use (other factors affecting continuous shooting performance include ISO speed, Picture Style choices, and Custom Functions). Under optimal conditions, high-speed continuous shooting can capture up to six images per second, and continuous shooting can capture as many as three images per second.
If you have the need for a long burst of photographs, something on the order of 25 or more, you’ll want to set your camera to shoot JPEGs, not RAW, and certainly not RAW + JPEG. (The maximum continuous shooting burst when recording both RAW and JPEG is seven exposures. In RAW, only, the maximum continuous shooting burst you can record is 13 exposures, unless you’re using a 128 GB UDMA 7 memory card, in which case you can record up to 18 exposures. And those figures are for CompactFlash memory cards, not for any version of SD memory cards.) If you’re recording Large Fine JPEG images to an 8 GB CompactFlash memory card, you should be able to record as many as 1,010 exposures in a single burst, but if you’re using a 128 GB UDMA 7 memory card, that value goes to 16,270 exposures captured in a single burst. Let’s see . . . with a shutter that’s been durability tested to 150,000 cycles, you should be able to use this extreme Large Fine JPEG continuous shooting burst example about nine times before you need to consider having Canon replace the shutter assembly.
Figure 7-5. EOS 5D Mk III shutter assembly
Look back at figures 7-2 and 7-3 for the Quick Control screen and the Drive Mode screen that can be used to quickly set the desired continuous shooting option.
Long Exposures
Long exposures are those that require one second or more. Such image captures are especially prone to increased noise, particularly at higher ISO settings. The SHOOT3 menu provides the Long Exposure Noise Reduction option, which can be set to OFF, AUTO, or ON. The AUTO option allows the camera to determine whether this special noise reduction technique is applied or not, while ON forces it to be active for every long exposure. The method used is based on the assumption that noise tends to come from the same image sensor pixels, whether light is falling on them or not. So, if a long-exposure image is recorded to the camera’s internal memory, and the sensor is then read again for the same long shutter speed but with no light falling on the image sensor, that dark image can be “subtracted” from the first image. By recording only the sensor noise in the dark image and subtracting it from the exposed image, the camera effectively removes noise caused only by long exposures. Noise from other sources is not reduced or eliminated by this technique. Be aware that if you enable long exposure noise reduction and shoot an image requiring 27 seconds, the camera will use 27 seconds to capture the initial image, then another 27 seconds to capture the “noise-only” image; the camera is not available for picture-taking during that time.
Be conscientious about reviewing any long-exposure image captures. In addition to noise, there are several factors that can diminish the quality of a photograph. They seem to be cumulative during long exposures, especially color shifts.
Delayed Exposures
Most photographers, at one time or another, have faced the need to set up a camera, trigger the shutter, then somehow get themselves into the picture. Early efforts involved the photographer setting up the camera and joining the lineup in front of it with a rubber bulb in hand. That bulb was attached to a long piece of rubber tubing that operated a pneumatic piston on the camera, which tripped the shutter. With a bit more sophistication, and with focal-plane shutters, the cameras started including “self-timers,” which could count down from a preset amount of time, then trip the shutter when the self-timer got to zero. Indeed, most of today’s DSLRs provide a digital version of this self-timer.
Being able to set up the camera, then enable a 10-second self-timer allows most photographers sufficient time to rejoin the group for their group photo. Most of today’s cameras also support a much lower timer value. The EOS 5D Mk III offers a two-second timer. That’s probably not enough time for you to run to the group before the shutter trips, but it’s just right for many macro photos, as well as tripod-mounted long telephoto shots: Set up the camera, trip the shutter, get out of the way for two seconds, and study your result on the image review screen. With the self-timer, the mirror is snapped up out of the way when you press the shutter button, but the shutter is not opened until the timer runs to zero. That procedure eliminates any vibration introduced by the slap of the mirror being moved up out of the way.
Though not truly delayed exposures, there are a number of situations in which you might want to capture one or more images by using some triggering mechanism. Canon makes a number of remote-control devices that allow you to be well away from the camera as you trigger the shutter, and also sells the Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3 remote switch for EOS cameras with the N3-type socket, such as that on the EOS 5D Mk III. This remote switch has a self-timer, an interval timer, a long-exposure timer, and an exposure-count-setting feature. The timer can be set from 1 second to 99 hours. The interval timer is truly great for those rare times when you want to set up the camera to focus on a cocoon and capture the emergence of the butterfly by taking a picture every five minutes (or whatever interval you set). As mentioned, I’ve chosen the Vello Wireless ShutterBoss as a remote shutter release, self-timer, interval timer, and long-exposure timer, and have been pleased.
Depth-of-Field and Focus Stacking
Let’s discuss focus stacking first. Focus stacking is not a feature of the EOS 5D Mk III, but is a technique that many EOS 5D Mk III shooters will use (or maybe should use). The point of focus stacking is to increase the apparent depth of field in your image. Depth of field limitations are a common problem in macrophotography, but are present in other genres as well. The trick to expanding depth of field is to capture a series of images, starting at one end of your focusing range and incrementally changing the focus as you capture each image, and working your way through that entire range. For a high-quality final product, it is essential that nothing else change—not the exposure, not the composition, and certainly not the lens focal length. Depending on the size of the subject and the distance to the subject, the number of focusing increments can vary from just a few to 20 or 30 increments, and possibly more. A tripod is strongly recommended for this activity, and using Live View can certainly help you determine where to set the focus for the next image. If you happen to have a computer with you, or if you’re working in an interior facility close to your normal computer, consider using the Remote Shooting feature in Canon’s EOS Utility. With Remote Shooting, you get a duplicate view of the LCD monitor on your computer screen, which significantly enhances your ability to establish sharp focus. You can also control several of the camera’s functions from your computer’s keyboard, and manual focus is important for focus stacking. Capture an image at each focusing increment.
After shooting, the challenge is to identify the sharpest-focused portion of each image and merge those pieces into a final photograph. There are some good after-market software products that specialize in focus stacking, including the free CombineZM and the free-to-try-out Helicon Focus, which provide relatively simple user interfaces. Of course, you can also use Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, although because the software programs are intended for a much more comprehensive catalog of tasks, set up and use is not nearly as simple. Nonetheless, figure 7-6 shows a result prepared in Bridge and Photoshop CS6.
Figure 7-6. Focus stacking example
The left-most graphic shows the detail available at the nearest focus, and the center graphic shows the detail at the farthest focus, while the right-most graphic—the result of focus stacking—shows the range of detail covering the detail from the first two images and all in between. The right-most image was actually created from 16 images that covered the entire range, but in small increments of deepening focus. Now, let’s see if I can use this kind of result to justify a small laptop to take into the field. . .
On to depth of field. When we focus on a point object in our image composition, we expect to get a point image in the final photograph. However, the laws of physics dictate that as we move either in front of that point or behind that point, we should expect the image of that point to become de-focused, inappropriately enlarging and blurring the image of the point and causing it to appear as a circle. Interestingly, though, our eyes are a bit forgiving and there is a certain range of displacement from the point in which we do not perceive the enlargement or blurring (we might see some, if the image is enlarged enough, which is why you should consider how an image might be processed in the future). The focus range in which we cannot distinguish the point of focus from the blurring caused by changing the focus is described as the range of acceptably sharp focus, and the circle at the threshold of acceptable sharpness is known as the circle of confusion.
What all that really says to a photographer is that there really is one distance at which a point will be sharp, and there are points in front and behind that are sufficiently sharp. There! I just described what depth of field is really all about: how much of an image will appear sharp, both in front of and behind the focused subject.
In photography, the lens aperture has the greatest effect on depth of field. The smaller the aperture (e.g., f/22), the greater the depth of field and, conversely, the larger the aperture (e.g., f/2.8), the shallower the depth of field. As the aperture goes to f/2.0 or f/1.4 or (Gulp! If you can afford it) f/1.2, the depth of field becomes extremely shallow. With apertures below f/16 or maybe even f/11, the only change in focusing is depth of field. But, with apertures above f/11 or f/16, while pursuing a greater depth of field, you may experience another phenomenon that seems to defeat the attempt. With small apertures, any lens will start to suffer from some degree of diffraction. As the aperture becomes smaller, the diffraction increases. Remember, the “sweet spot” of most lenses is around f/8 to f/11.
Understanding depth of field, and how to influence it, should give you better control over the composition of your photos. Far too many photographers view their images as simple, two-dimensional representations of what they saw as they composed the picture. In reality, that composition has a third dimension, and that is depth of field. Furthermore, increased depth of field is not always the desired objective. If you find a gorgeous rose begging to be photographed, but the background is a mashup of falling fence and rusty garbage cans, do you walk on by or consider what you can do to significantly shorten the depth of field? If you could focus on the rose but visually convert the background into a collage of indistinguishable shapes and interesting, soft colors, would you reconsider the opportunity?
Given that you want to capture the rose (or whatever your subject is), your first reaction is to reduce the depth of field, which means to make the aperture large. But that means more light will be allowed in, so the shutter speed will probably be shortened, or the ISO set lower. But by how much? That depends on just how much you change the aperture. You have two or three tools to help you decide how much you should change the aperture: the viewfinder, the LCD monitor if you’re using Live View, and the depth-of-field preview button. The image in the viewfinder is pretty sharp, but it is also small, whereas the LCD monitor is significantly larger. In Live View mode, you can also use the magnify button to enlarge a portion of the displayed image and select the point that precisely controls focus.
Once you’re focused the image by using either viewing window, press the depth-of-field preview button to see what the final depth of field will be. This is necessary because the camera holds the lens aperture wide open during composition to give you as much light as possible for evaluating the image. But the lens will stop down to the set aperture when the shutter button is pressed, or when the depth-of-field preview button is pressed. If you’re using the viewfinder and have selected a small aperture for the exposure, there may be insufficient light transmitted when the depth-of-field preview button is pressed to allow you to clearly see the details of the image. Sorry, but that’s another result of the laws of physics. However, the Live View screen always tries to present a display that is as close to the final image as possible, so it will remain adequately bright while you’re holding the depth-of-field preview button down, even for the smallest aperture the lens provides.