I'll Conquer This Thing or One of Us Will End Up in the Bin

Tuesday afternoon, I trekked out to the "nuclear park," determined to grab my new camera by the throat and get it to cough up decent pictures.  I had a wonderful time out in the fresh air, clicking off shots of trees and herons and a little group of geese.  Unfortunately, when I got home and downloaded the pictures, I discovered to my chagrin that I had collected about 150 really bad pictures.  Mostly related to the issues I was having getting the willful thing to focus where I wanted it and STAY focused.

So, last night I sat down and watched 2 You-tube videos on how to deal with my damn camera.  One had to do with setting up back-button focus, and disabling the auto-focus through the shutter.  This enables one to set the focus then depress the shutter without the camera deciding to refocus at the last minute.  Executed that change rather handily, but there was one more thing to address.    

Let me interject here that changing settings on these damned complicated machines is neither simple nor intuitive.  It involves diving into a bottomless morass  of menus accessed through half a dozen buttons, wheels and screens.  My default method of dealing with any new technology I purchase--going through and hitting buttons until I get the thing to do what I want--is utterly useless with the more advanced digital cameras.   Thank the Universe for You-tube, or I would be the proud owner of a $1400 doorstop.

The other focus issue I was having had to do with the setting of the "focus points"--of which, apparently, there are 21...20 too many, in my humble opinion.  And god forbid that the default on the camera should be a one-point center focus!  Hell f***-ing no!  The camera comes out of the box set to auto-focus on the thing closest to it.  So, if I'm trying to catch a pic of a bird in a tree behind some branches, the thing is going to focus on those branches, no matter how much I shout and bang it on a rock.  The nice man on the You-tube video showed me how to correct that, and now, it is to be hoped, I will be able to go out and get some semi-properly focused pictures without tearing my hair out. 

Of course, it's monsoon season, so I have no idea when the weather will be decent enough for me to actually take the camera out and field test the adjustments.  Hell...I'll probably just go out anyway, rain or not.  I'm determined to master this thing, and I have to get out there and deal with it before I forget what I did to make it do what I want.