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| Photo by Jack Howard |
| After some tweaking of our settings and depth of field (followed by some minor post-production), our shot, as pre-visualized, is ready for sharing -- all made easier by Remote capture. Click photo for more images. |
We'll admit it. It took us some time to warm up to the idea of "Live View" functions on DSLRs. No more! Now that we've spent some time in the studio with the Canon EOS 40D and its Live View capabilities, we're sold on its uses in the studio and other controlled situations.
Sure, there are times in the field when Live View on the camera's LCD may come in handy for low or high-angle framing, but the real strength of Live View is in the studio, when the 40D is tethered to a computer and the view is displayed on your monitor via a camera control utility.
Mirroring the display to a computer monitor via the extra-long, shielded USB cord that ships with the 40D affords the studio shooter several real advantages:
• The camera can be positioned for the best possible shooting angle, with less concern about making it optical-viewfinder accessible.
• The display on the computer monitor can be displayed larger than is possible on the 3-inch LCD.
• The photographer, art director, client, and others can easily view an image on a computer screen at the same time, in real-time.
It is a very different feel than looking through the lens, and a mouseclick or hotkey doesn't have nearly the tactile satisfaction of a shutter button, but it works. And in our tabletop experiments, it really helped make the shot without compromises, and without straining anything to peer through the viewfinder at wacky angles.
The shot of our studio set-up (see photo gallery) shows you where the camera is located: mere inches above the sweep. And between the tripod and lightstand legs, it was a clunky angle for employing the optical viewfinder, or even the on-camera LCD. But tethering the 40D to a laptop on a swiveling table allowed us to compose, focus the camera manually, and re-compose our shot from the sides of the sweep past the lightboxes. All this was possible even while keeping an eye on the composition in real time on the computer monitor and controlling the camera via EOS Utility's remote shooting interface. Zooming in to 10x for focus confirmation was a real help, especially when we were a few feet from the monitor.
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With this shoot, we were able to position the camera and lights in such a way that it was possible to adjust the focus by physically moving the lens's focusing ring, since the EOS Utility software that is bundled with the camera does not allow for remote autofocusing via computer. All in all, we like what Live View on a computer monitor can do for the creative studio photographer. But the lack of an autofocusing abilities left us longing for a mouseclick solution.
Next Page: An independent programmer to the rescue! (For Windows, only, that is.)
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