What setting for the A710?

My A710 just arrived from UPS and I have a few questions...

1. auto ISO or 80 or 100?
2. AWB for indoor or tungsten?
3. single or continuous shooting?
4. metering?
5. compression size?
6. recording size?
7. auto focus?
8. IS mode?

And any other helpful hints would be great. Thank you!

To start with I would recommend the following settings until you get a handle on the camera and a few good shots and feel more confident to experiment:

-ISO 100
-Evaluative metering (very accurate imo)
-Daylight and tungsten white balance respectively (but AWB works very well too)
-Shoot only IS mode (to save batteries)
-Single shooting
-My colours off (gives very natural colors)

-AiAf focusing (unless you're doing a portrait then center focus ... half press shutter to focus on eyes and recompose while shutter half pressed).

The above works for me .... 90% of my shooting is on aperture priority ... however if you're using flash I find best results on P mode + auto flash (if the subject is within 4 meters ......otherwise A mode + auto flash).

The beauty of digital is you can experiment with different settings, see the results immediately and erase as required.

Hope this helps ... I'd be interested to know how you get on.

--
Hisham
http://www.him2.smugmug.com

Thanks Hisham, useful information, do you agree with dpreview f 1/4 - 1/5 is best for landscape shooting
I will post my pics next week

Hi andreas .. to be honest I hadn't noticed any difference between the fstops IQ but usually if there's enough light I like to go to f5.6 and smaller for landscapes and architecture and I think the results are still OK.

--
Hisham
http://www.him2.smugmug.com

all personal preference..but !

ISO : i set iso to 100 and only change when i get to very low light conditions... reasoning?..i have zero idea what the camera decision making is, and iso is not indicated in exif if set to auto

metering: evaluative seems to have unclear results to me.. i shoot in cw vast majority of the time.. very easy to add EC if needed with this camera

IS : shoot only; saves battery life

AF: play with the AiAF, but it seems to pick the most silly point to focus on, the green square lights up in the unlikely places and is disconcerting.. so i set to manual AF and selected the centre green square

shooting mode: i set to single shot as default...and change as necessary

compression: large gives vg results...set to superfine if you are nervous

in essence i have "dumbed down" the camera so that i have predictable results.... just a personal preference, as opposed to going "wtf" when a shot seems wierd..

have fun, ian

--

~ Being over-exposed can get you arrested ~

1. I use ISO 80 on the theory that if I want a higher setting (and the attendant noise) I'd want to make that decision myself rather than having it made for me.

2. I've been pretty pleased with the "auto" AWB setting under most of the conditions I've encountered so far.

3. There's no reason to use continuous shooting under most circumstances, so I leave it off.

4. I've been using evaluative metering by default. When I don't get what I want I can often change the exposure by pointing it somewhere that's lighter or darker, half-pressing the shutter to lock the setting, reframe and shoot. If that doesn't work, I use exposure compensation. On only one or two occasions have I felt the need to go to spot metering mode.

5. I haven't experimented with the different compression modes yet so I've been taking all my shots in the best "S" quality setting.

6. I've been taking my shots at the M2 setting and only going to higher resolutions when I feel I'm taking something special. At the number of shots I take the GB add up pretty fast.

7. I've been flip-flopping between Centre and AiAF focusing. There are some circumstances where I prefer one, and some the other.

8. I've generally been using "Shoot Only" mode. One tip is to make sure you turn IS OFF if you're taking long exposures (like 1 sec or more) because it seems to cause picture blur even if the camera is on a tripod.

I usually leave the "play" mode set so that it shows the picture histogram and exposure information along with the image. I find it hard to judge the exposure from the LCD display (it always seems a little too bright to me), so I find the histogram invaluable in getting the exposure of challenging subjects just right. And I really like the feature that identifies the overexposed ("blown highlights") areas of the image.

One thing missing on the A710 is a larger focus area. As an example my current Sony P200 and other Sony´s have a 5 Area Multi-Point AF giving sharpness all over the picture. I feel in the beginning I will halfpress all shots before taking them and if the AiAF chooses fewer regions than I wish, I halfpress again and may get different focus points.

AF: play with the AiAF, but it seems to pick the most silly point to focus on, the green square lights up in the unlikely places and is disconcerting.. so i set to manual AF and selected the centre green square

What do you mean by manual AF. I was using the center choice. Do you mean you shoot in M mode?

Thanks so much everyone. I changed my ISO from auto to 100 and IS from continuous to shoot only. What about digital zoom? I turned it off???

Thanks everyone!

andreas23 said:

I will halfpress all shots before taking them and if the AiAF chooses
fewer regions than I wish...

Click to expand...

The point isn't to get the maximum number of green squares, it's to get green squares on whichever portions of the picture that you want to be in the sharpest focus.

stonehill said:

What do you mean by manual AF. I was using the center choice. Do
you mean you shoot in M mode?

Click to expand...

You can focus the camera manually by pressing twice on the bottom of the 4-way selector (marked with "MF"). The first press puts the camera into Macro mode, the second press puts it into manual focus mode. Note - this won't work in "Auto" mode, only in "Program" or one of the manual modes.

In manual focus mode you use the left/right buttons to focus, aided by the focus scale at the top of the viewfinder and the enlarged portion of the image shown in the centre of the LCD. The rather low resolution of the LCD makes it a little tricky to get exactly the right focus point, but if you're uncertain whether it's really in focus or not you can use the distance scale to help you take a few shots at slightly different settings.

stonehill said:

What about digital zoom? I turned it off???

Click to expand...

I leave mine set to "Standard". With this setting, if zooming in with the optical zoom doesn't get the image big enough then you just keep holding the zoom lever and it will automatically go into the digital zoom range.

You can see the digital zoom on the scale at the top of the LCD - the portion of the zoom range that's coloured yellow or blue is the digital zoom portion. Yellow indicates that you're not loosing any resolution (you'll only see this if you have the recording resolution set to less than the maximum of 3072 x 2304 pixels). Blue means that the camera is upscaling the pixels to give you the additional magnification - this reduces the sharpness of the resulting image.

If you set the zoom to "1.5X" or "1.9X" then the image will always be zoomed digitally by that amount, even if you use the zoom lever to go to full wide-angle. The reason you might want to use this has to do with the fact that the optical zoom looses light as it zooms in - at full zoom the lens requires more than twice as long an exposure as at wide angle. Thus in low light conditions you need to use a longer shutter speed as you zoom in, and of course the combination of long shutter speed with higher zoom is a double whammy that increases the chances that your picture will be blurry due to camera shake. IS helps with this, of course, but it's still something that you have to be aware of.

By setting the digital zoom to "1.5X", the image will be digitally zoomed by 50% without actually engaging the optical zoom. This means you'll be able to use a faster shutter speed than if you used the optical zoom to enlarge the image by 50%.

This can be useful in low light situations (as long as you're aware of the sharpness you can loose by using digital zoom), but it wouldn't make sense to leave the camera set "1.5X" or "1.9X" zoom normally.

I guess that's why I was using center focus. Still not sure what the difference between center and MF is. I do see where to activate it now.

stonehill said:

Still not sure what the difference between center and MF is.

Click to expand...

With centre focus, the camera will automatically focus on whatever's in the centre box when you push the shutter release halfway down. With manual focus, the camera will not attempt to focus at all - you must focus manually using the left and right buttons before you press the shutter.

You would only use manual focus if you have some special effect you're going for, or if the auto focus just wouldn't work for you. Examples where the autofocus might have problems are very low light conditions or very low contrast conditions (for example, taking a picture of a hazy sky where there are no sharp objects for the camera to focus on).

The other reason you might choose to use manual focus is that the camera will respond very quickly when you press the shutter button because it doesn't have to spend time figuring out right focus point. So at a sporting event, for example, you could pre-set a specific manual focus distance (assuming the action is all happening at the same distance from you) and then snap off action pictures without the usual autofocus shutter delay.

Thanks Sean. That helps. I think I'll stay in center focus for now. I don't really care for the AIAF so far.

Is there a way to tell how much battery is left?

--
Hisham
http://www.him2.smugmug.com

stonehill said:

Is there a way to tell how much battery is left?

Click to expand...

The battery warning indicator will start flashing when you have a few pictures' worth of juice left. My strategy is to always have a spare set of charged batteries available so you can switch when the batteries run out. NiMH batteries with a low self-discharge rate (ie, long shelf life) like Sanyo's Eneloops are a good bet for this.

Well my husband just picked up a four pack of Energizer rechargeables 2500 mAh. Hopefully they will work fine. I like to know how much battery I have left. I usually switch to using the viewfinder when they get below a certain point. Isn't it odd to not have this feature?

Yes it is inconvenient, however the beauty of using AAs is that even in emergencies it shouldn't be too difficult to get your hands on a couple.

richardd recently started a thread mentioning how as he was about to take shots of the Taj Mahal with his A710IS he ran out of juice but was able to buy a couple of AAs from a nearby photographer and get the shots before sunset. A cool story neatly highlighting the convenience of this feature.

--
Hisham
http://www.him2.smugmug.com

Im just suprised thats all. My old sony takes AA's but lets me know how much battery is left. What if I'm downloading photos using the camera and USB cable and the battery suddenly runs out?