Know Your Technology

Because of the cookie post and because I give Mom a hard time about using my camera, I thought that I would share my most recent problem with using my camera:

My camera has three focus modes: One Shot (for still subjects), Al Servo (for moving subjects), and Al Focus (for still subjects that sometimes move). I normally have my camera set to Al Focus because it sounds the best (I had to look up what each mode did to write this..seriously, Al Servo?? how am I supposed to remember what that means?) but for some reason I decided to set my camera to Al Servo on Thursday.

So anyway, I'm taking pictures and for some reason I can't get the focus lock to work (you know...when you press the shutter button halfway down, the camera focus on the middle, and then you can recompose your image so every picture you take doesn't have your main subject in the dead center...). At first I though I was just being stupid and not holding the button down correctly or something like that, but after a while I realized that the focus lock wasn't working for any of my pictures!

I started to freak out because I must have focus lock! There is no way I could take pictures without it (without going insane). Sooo...at this point I started getting mentally prepared to send my camera to Canon Services and being camera-less for a week or two. Definitely not what I want to do, but I'll make sacrifices for a functional (functioning?) camera.

Of course before I shipped my camera off, I checked the online support to see if there was just a quick fix or something. And guess what?!? There is!!! Apparently the focus lock doesn't work when the camera is in Al Servo mode...so all I had to do was switch the mode back to Al Focus, and my camera worked again! Yay!

Well that story became a lot more technical than I wanted...but basically I set my camera in the wrong mode, the focusing wouldn't work right, I freaked out, and then I figured out how to fix the focus with just a simple mode adjustment.

So Mom, even I have problems with that camera.