Set It And Forget It!

By Blair Howard

Now I know you’ve heard that before. It’s Ron Popeel’s catch phrase for his Holiday rotisserie. But it can work for us photographers too 

How To Shoot Great Photos – Properly Exposed and Focused - 90% of the Time: 

Why do you never see press photographers adjusting their f-stops or changing lenses in the middle of a shoot? 

They use a simple technique that takes most of the guesswork out of what they do. You can use it too. 

There’s an old saying amongst photographers – “f-8 and be there.”  You’ve seen them; I know you have. It’s the technique they use when they stand with their cameras held high above their heads, arms at full extension, shooting into the crowd without adjusting their camera settings or lenses. 

Many a press photographer will sally forth, armed only with a camera body, a high speed motor drive, and a wide angle lens (yes, they’ll have back-up units in the bag or car, but one is all they need most of the time). He will, dependent upon the available light, set the shutter speed at 1/250th of a second, the aperture at F/8, and will pre-focus the lens to about 10 feet . Experience tells him that everything between a distance of about five feet in front of the camera to almost infinity will be in sharp focus or, at least, within acceptable focus. 

The result: the shutter speed of 1/250 will freeze all but the fastest action, and because of the wide field of view offered by the wide angle lens, he doesn't even need to look though the view-finder. The aperture set at f-8 will provide, in combination with the wide-angle lens, all the depth of field he needs.  

All he has to do is point the camera in the general direction of the action, hit the shutter release, and the camera will do the rest. He gets his pictures.  They will be in focus (they will be acceptably sharp), they will be properly exposed and, most importantly, they will be acceptable by the editor – salable. This is how the Paparazzi operate most of the time. 

So, on an average day, under normal contrast situations (meaning you’re not outside on a sunny day in the snow or standing in the woods in the shadows ) you can put your camera into manual focus mode, pre-focused at 10 feet, set your camera aperture to F/8, and  your shutter to 1/250^th of a second, and your ISO speed to 200, and you’ll get acceptable pictures at least 90% of the time.  Yep, there will be times when you’ll to make an adjustment – maybe low light will require a higher ISO, but that’s about it. 

This is a very liberating way to shoot because you don’t have to wait for your camera to auto focus before taking each shot.  You just click and go.  And in most cases, you’ll end up with a perfectly focused, properly exposed photograph. 

This is how I shoot when I’m on the fly. When I’m teaching at our live workshops, I shoot like this nearly every day.  My aperture is set at F/8, my shutter speed at 1/250, and my ISO at 100 (that’s the lowest ISO number on my camera) and I usually get some amazing pictures.  Best of all, I don’t have to wait for my camera to focus like I would have if I have it in Auto Focus Mode.  Those few extra seconds allowed me to capture quite a few on-the-fly shots. 

By the way, we do some 8 or 10 of these live workshops every year. Everyone has a great time and learns a lot and everybody always comes away with some amazing photographs. If you’re interested in attending, please check out the schedule on Blair's website at www.blairhoward.com. 

Blair Howard is a professional photojournalist  www.blairhoward.com. 

This article is copyright © Blair Howard 2006. All rights reserved. You can reprint this article for free but you must retain the internal links and the credit line at the bottom of the article intact.