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A guy at a Sedona shoot told me to ditch my monitor and use a ninja star as a focus aid, and honestly it kind of worked
So two weeks ago I was up in Sedona filming some b-roll of the red rocks for a tourism piece, and this older camera op named Dale who was shooting next to me kept eyeballing my rig. He walks over and says my 7 inch monitor was making me lazy, that I should tape a little paper ninja star around my lens barrel at the focus mark and just trust the mark instead of staring at a screen. I laughed it off at first because come on, a ninja star? But the sun was blowing out my screen all afternoon and I kept missing focus on the juniper branches in the foreground, so around take 14 I gave it a shot. Taped the thing on, set my aperture to f8 for a deeper plane, and my hit rate jumped way up, like I went from maybe half my clips being usable to almost all of them. By the time golden hour hit I was nailing focus pulls on the rock formations without even glancing at the monitor. I still use the screen for framing and exposure, but that dumb paper star lives in my bag now. Has anyone else here tried the old tape a mark on the barrel trick, or am I the only one taking advice from strangers in a parking lot?
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diana5510d ago
Taping a little star on your lens didn't fix anything, the sun did. You said yourself the screen was blown out all afternoon, so of course your hit rate went up once you stopped staring at a washed out image. That's not the star, that's you finally watching the actual scene. And f8 on red rocks in daylight gives you so much depth that almost anything in that range looks sharp, so you could've taped a gum wrapper there and gotten the same clips. Dale handed you a placebo with a cool name. Try that same trick at f2 on a moving subject at 85mm and see how many keepers you get.
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