Speeding Up Your Digital Camera

A veteran Leica street shooter contacted me with complaints about her new digital camera. She's an established black and white shooter, using a Leica M6 with a wide angle lens to shoot people unaware of the camera in their natural surroundings.

Excited by her new digital acquisition, she took to the streets after a scan of the "quick start" portion of the user manual and shot in the Automatic mode.

Her complaint? "I'm just not getting the same kind of shots that I do with my M6."

As the teens at the mall say, "Well, duh!" She had just learned about the phenomenon of most digital cameras called "exposure lag," non-existent in her conventional Leica. My advice to her was to learn the manual exposure functions of her digital camera through a thorough reading of the user manual and try to emulate the techniques she uses with her Leica.

Drum Band in Edinburgh: Photo by Jim Patterson

Here are those suggestions, many of which will apply to all digital cameras:

1. Turn off the flash. Since she shoots in available light anyway, having the camera decide whether the auto flash is needed adds to exposure lag.

2. Use manual focus and set the focus distance to about 10 feet. With her Leica, she uses pre-set focus distance, works to shoot within that focus range and relies upon depth-of-field for sharpness. Why not do the same with the digital and eliminate the time-consuming automatic focus function?

3. Shoot in aperture preferred mode with the lens set to wide angle and choose the smallest aperture. This will increase the inherent depth of field just as it does with her Leica.

4. Increase the exposure sensitivity. Her digital camera's default sensitivity is the equivalent of ISO 80. However, it can be set manually to ISO 100, 200 or 400. Using ISO 400 will provide faster shutter speeds. The higher sensitivity may result in some noise (grain) just as it does with film.

5. Shoot in black and white mode. Although digital cameras record black and white images as three-channel RGB, less electronic noise is exhibited in the gray scale mode. The screen shot below shows the blue channels of an RGB color shot (left) and a grayscale (but still in its RGB mode) on the right. Note the color noise that shows up in the color version. All three grayscale channels exhibit the same exact lack of noise.

RGB vs. Grayscale channels (Click to enlarge)

6. Shoot in "Normal" versus "Fine" quality mode. Her camera compresses images in JPEG and the Normal mode reads the image to the memory card about twice as fast as in Fine mode. I've found it's almost impossible to discern a quality difference in comparing images from the two modes. Further, it doubles the number of exposures available.

7. Extend the period of time before the camera goes to sleep. In her camera, the default is 30 seconds of inactivity before the camera shuts down its exposure readiness. Setting the period to five minutes ensures against losing a shot because her camera is automatically reawakening.

8. Turn off the LCD monitor and use the viewfinder to shoot. Precious seconds are lost if the monitor has to review the last shot made. Leaving the monitor off also extends battery life.

9. Use NiMH batteries and carry a spare charged set. Keeping the camera awake for a longer time will decrease battery life.

My camera has three "user sets" available and one of these sets is customized to the above settings. I switch to it whenever I am prowling a location in search of people shots rather than scenery.

Using this mode, I worked in close to a percussion band in Edinburgh, Scotland, and noticed the pair of lovers on the steps of the art museum in the background. Preset depth-of-field carried the day to help me capture the scene at the top of this column.

Another technique I use for street shooting is to employ my camera's swivel LCD monitor and shoot from waist level, looking down at the camera and not at my subject. Or I swivel the monitor to an advantageous angle and shoot with only the lens pointing at the subject. This is the technique used to capture the five members of a Thai family on their motorbike.

Five Thais on a Bike: Photo by Jim Patterson

After a few weeks my street shooter friend reported that she was doing much better with her digital camera although it's "still not quite the same as my M6." But now she's horrified at the monster size of her Photoshop files. Since she's a Photoshop neophyte as well, I referred her to my Planet Photoshop column on resizing and told her about saving her images as gray scale TIFFs.

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson is famous for having captured "the decisive moment." Your neighborhood is full of decisive moments. Capturing them digitally can be easier if you work to decrease exposure lag.