DirtFarmer
Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA
For several years now I have advocated for an addition to camera firmware.
Lots of cameras have a way to save settings to the card. That way you can restore the settings at any time. The drawback is that when you reformat the card, you lose the settings file.
Lots of cameras have a two-button reset that returns the camera to factory settings. What we need is a two-button reset (a separate one) that returns the camera to USER settings. You save the user settings in flash memory and you can return to them with the two-button reset. Or return to them with a menu item. Best of all would be a setting that would reload all your settings at power up.
Hopefully that would include exposure compensation and bracketing.
I suspect that almost every photographer has done this misstep at one time or another. I use Olympus EM1 MK II and some lenses have a clutch with the manual focus ring so you simply move it forward or back to switch from auto to manual focus. I have gone nuts on occasion wondering why I can't get auto focus to work, and then realize I had left the lens in manual focus setting.
My routine, at least most of the time, is to reset ISO, f-stop, WB and exposure compensation to my 'standard setting' during shoots and certainly at the end of a shoot when I am packing up my gear.
bdk
Loc: Sanibel Fl.
I had been shooting or trying to shoot the rings of saturn. The next day I was in a park and here comes a mother raccoon and 3 babies following close behind. I picked up the camera and took a pic, yup it was set on one minute exposure. 2 minutes later the camera is ready to shoot again but of course the raccoons had saw me by then and took off into the woods. lesson learned ( again)
I been having those moments since I was born!
My favorite trick is to set the 2-second delay while using a tripod, then a week or two later failing to catch a hand-held shot because the shutter button won't cooperate. A second or two later I usually get a blurry selfie instead.
I did this yesterday...My Fuji x-h1 would not show any color with focus peaking. Spent about an hour with the manual, browsing the internet, and finally called Fuji help desk. Started going thru settings with agent until He told me to be sure I had switched camera over to manual mode...DUH! DUH!
revhen
Loc: By the beautiful Hudson
Wait'll you try to take the picture of a black cat at midnight in a coal bin.
PHRubin wrote:
I had taken a few shots of my dog. She is a dark red/brown and was on a white floor. The shots were coming out too dark, so I pushed the EC up to +3. That worked fine.
The next time I used that camera I was taking shots of leaves on my lawn and couldn't understand why only auto gave the right exposure, any other mode was horribly overexposed... UNTIL, finally, the epiphany! DUHH - I still had the +3 EC set!
I have done that more times than I care to mention, I also wish that when you turn the camera off it would return to zero.
PHRubin wrote:
I had taken a few shots of my dog. She is a dark red/brown and was on a white floor. The shots were coming out too dark, so I pushed the EC up to +3. That worked fine.
The next time I used that camera I was taking shots of leaves on my lawn and couldn't understand why only auto gave the right exposure, any other mode was horribly overexposed... UNTIL, finally, the epiphany! DUHH - I still had the +3 EC set!
Been there, done that on multiple situations such as having set the auto-focus limiter to not go beyond 10m only wonder why the camera isn't focusing on that distant tree anymore or adjusting the diopter setting on the viewfinder because I using glasses instead of contacts and then at a later time thinking my camera is messed up because things weren't in focus even though it said it was. The latter went through several tests with different lenses before I remembered the diopter setting. I was just about to send the camera off for repair.
Do not agree that this is a senior moment. I have talked to people of all ages who have made this mistake. IMHO the camera should revert to a exposure value of 0 every time it is turned off.
I call these moments and result by official name
Operator error
DWU2
Loc: Phoenix Arizona area
Linda From Maine wrote:
Yep, been there done that. I always try to move settings back to a "middle road" before putting the camera back on the shelf.
.
Sometimes I have had the opposite problem - My Canon 7DII has several custom modes on the mode dial. I have one set for wildlife photography, for example. Let's say it's programmed for 1/1600, f/8, Auto ISO. If I want, I can override those defaults (like setting shutter to 1/2500) and take photos. But, if the camera goes into battery-saving sleep mode, when I wake up the camera by pressing a button, it reverts back to pre-set values. Before I discovered that, I'd set the camera to override, wait for a bird to appear, then take a shot, only to discover later that the camera threw away my override! Now I turn off sleep mode and carry another battery.
If you want to reply, then
register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.