Digital Bird-photography: Compact Digital Camer as (cont)

[Rob Roy <>]

A quick note about shutter lag on Digital Cameras.

In my experience (at least on the p&s digitals I've used), shutter lag is in two stages.

The first and by far the majority of the delay is what I call the "setup" stage - while the white-balance, aperture and shutter setting and focussing is being done.

Once the "setup" is complete the actual photo-taking delay is very short (a few milliseconds).

You can cheat on many digital cameras by "half-shuttering" or holding the shutter half way down to tell the camera to do the setup tasks, then recompose the shot and/or wait until the bird/child/animal moves into the desired pose before pressing the shutter the rest of the way down. It then "feels" like you have a very short lag and can catch the exact moment you want.

After a while half-shuttering becomes a habit and I must say I never felt bothered by shutter lag on my old Kodak 280 or 5000 or the Canon Powershots I've used. I still do this on my new Canon DSLR although on this camera any delay is mostly due to auto-focus requirements.

Regards,
Robert Roy
www.roblog.com/4images/
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Mob 0407 66 80 90
Email
Glenwood NSW 2768 Australia
Canon EOS 300D, Sigma 400/f5.6 APO
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Alas, must amass more cash for good glass
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-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Inglis
Sent: Monday, 1 March 2004 7:34 AM
To:
Subject: [BIRDING-AUS] Digital Bird-photography: Compact Digital Cameras (cont)

Shutter Response:
This is probably the most important feature as far as bird-photographers are concerned!
As birds are often quite active little blighters it is best to have a camera which 'responds'
quickly when the shutter button is pressed.
Up until recently this was a rare thing in most Compact Digital Cameras. Most Compact Digicams have had a bad reputation for excessive 'shutter-lag', i.e., the time between when the shutter button is pressed and when the shutter actually operates.

Note: This has nothing to do with the actual shutter speed.
Shutter-lag can range from a fraction of a second to several seconds and is caused by the camera having to carry out a number of functions after the shutter button is pressed and before the shutter can be allowed to operate.

Some of these functions include:
- Checking white-balance (see above)
- Focusing
- Setting aperture and shutter speed

If the camera is being used in a full-auto mode and the light is not ideal these functions can take quite some time which often results in a missed shot, the bird having flown!

It is possible to reduce this time somewhat by using some 'manual' settings (aperture and/or shutter
speed) but the real problem is usually the focusing speed.
The auto-focus works best when there is good light allowing aperture sizes greater than approx 5.6, so the story goes.