pardon? isn’t it the smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field? and the higher the ISO the greater the light gathering?
Meh, yes that’s what I meant. I think I was thinking something like “Open the aperture for more background separation” or something like that and “depth of field” slipped in there somehow.
but if you’re shooting RAW, 100 lets you dig a lot deeper into the shadows for detail.
when i first got into B/W photography i was taught to shoot tri-x at 250 then under develop slightly to get shadow detail w/o getting too much noticeable grain. is this similar? i really don’t understand why letting in less light would produce more detail. with film the actual media (the film coating) is different for different ISOs. or is there something in the software that produces the same results.[/quote]
Shooting at ISO 100 means you’re letting in more light.
You could get away with pull-processing (i.e. shooting 400 ISO film at 250) with film because it’s amazingly tolerant of highlights, but it’s lacking in shadow detail so you’d pull process it to get those shadows back. With digital it’s the opposite, highlights clip a lot faster than film but you’ve got easily a good couple stops of detail in the shadows, especially at a low-noise ISO setting like 100. A lot of times if I’ve got a highlight-heavy scene I’ll intentionally underexpose a couple stops to preserve the highlights and bring the mids and shadows back in post.
I shoot with glasses too. I tried getting one of those eyepiece extenders to help but I didn’t like it, made the viewfinder look too small and added a little bit of barrel distortion to it too. Now I just put up with it.
What I do to avoid smudgies on the LCD is put one of those plastic protecting sheets over it.
“Rear button focusing” is custom function 4 on the 30D. I’ve honestly never had a problem with accidentally taking a shot while holding the shutter down halfway, there’s a definite “click” in the button that requires positive pressure to go further. When I have it set to the high speed drive mode I know I have trouble taking just one shot (I leave it in single shot mostly anyway, even for sports). I know when I tried my friend’s 5D the button felt very mushy and I could definitely see someone taking shots accidentally with that. It’s strange because the 30D and 5D are built on the same basic body design, they even take the same battery grip.
