I have posted in the past about some of the advantages of having a live view feature on your camera, especially for the types of photography that I do using my Canon 5DII. This past week I discovered another use, and an unexpected one at that – shooting in conditions of gusty winds.
I most often work from the tripod, and I usually use a pretty large and stable tripod in the context of shooting a full frame DSLR camera. But in some very windy conditions putting the camera on a tripod is not sufficient to stop camera motion and the consequent blur. This is especially a problem when you are shooting in low light or otherwise need to use very long exposure times, and it becomes worse when using long lenses which will catch more wind and magnify vibrations. There are a bunch of tricks that you can try in order to keep the camera steady, but in really strong winds the camera is just going to move, especially if you have a very large lens attached.
One way I try to deal with this is to time my exposures for moments when the wind may momentarily decrease. This can require a lot of patience – sometimes I’ve had to wait several minutes for a very brief halt to the gale, during which I try to make my exposure. But even in this case, you have to make sure that the camera vibration stops completely if you are using a long lens. Ultimately, you have to simply trust that the camera really has stabilized since there is no way to tell directly. Last week, as I was using live view to focus a 400mm lens on a distant subject and again noting that 400mm plus 10x software zoom in live view makes the camera very sensitive to vibration. In the past I have noted this mainly in the context of how darn hard it is to manually focus a big lens this way! But this time it occurred to me that I could use this in my favor.
With the 10x live view magnification enabled, the display is very sensitive to camera motion from the wind. I realized that by leaving the camera in the 10x magnification setup after composing the shot that I could simply watch this display, with its magnification of motion, and wait until the image stabilized during lulls in the wind to take my shots. If the display isn’t bouncing at 10x, motion blur is not going to be an issue. Problem solved. More or less.
G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Tom, that is one of the other great advantages of the feature – namely that you can get the camera into places where you cannot get your face and still see the subject!
Funny, I found myself using this tip this morning as I was shooting some Pine Siskins. They were on the other side of a six foot fence, so I put the camera on the top of the fence but couldn’t get to the view finder. Switch to live view, zoom in on the birds, focus, shoot.
It all worked quite well. Thanks!
This is something that I’ve been using a little lately myself to focus manually as Dan said. Neat idea for using it in strong winds.
Interesting, I have never been able to see the LCD well enough to compose an image in live view. But I didn’t know that you could zoom the view 10x. Looks like I need to play with this a bit more.
So far I have been using the video capabilities to record bird songs, and I really haven’t cared whether I get a good focus or not. But there are certainly times when it would have been nice to capture some sharp video.
Thanks.
Tom, I don’t use it so much to compose (with an exception or two) but I do use it to manually focus, where it is much more accurate than trying to focus on the ground glass in the viewfinder.