1D X Tips and Tricks

[peety3]

What I'm suggesting is not an automatic or semi-automatic exposure. I'm running around somewhere, shooting in M as usual. At some point I want to change the depth-of-field but the exposure I chose earlier and was shooting at was already correct. So when I change the aperture to change the dof I need to compensate by changing the exposure time. So I for every click of one wheel I need to click the other wheel, too. The EV-Lock, while engaged, would automatically perform this compensating change to the second wheel. No automatic exposure, it's still all M, it sounds like you are reading too much into this feature.

For the record, no, I'm not reading too much into this. I get it completely. I just don't understand the logic behind "give me full control of the camera, using the knobs at my disposal, across the three dimensions of the exposure triangle. Great, thanks. Now stop and give me a macro so I can turn one knob and not have to turn another knob, because I'm too lazy to do so myself after turning them just a moment ago." Further, I think it's a short-sighted assumption to think that the 327 1Dx customers who might want this would want the macro to only pair up aperture & shutter - some are going to want aperture & ISO as the mated pairing, and others are going to want shutter & ISO as the mated pairing. Now it's not so simple...

[Colin500]

Now it's not so simple...

You are right. Of course what I really want is the camera to implement a scripting language. Expose all features as functions in that scripting language. Let me assign a custom script to all buttons. Then I can do some true 21st-century-style customisation. The technology is available and, as I have had the opportunity to experience in a reasonably similar context, easy to implement. The customisation we are getting now is still very old-school and is not using the possibilities we have today to really go beyond the customisation paradigm of 20 years ago. It's quite sad in a multi-thousand-dollar device when many other areas with unit costs down to at least double-digit prices have already transitioned to expose the general-purpose processing capabilities that they have for customisation. It's a logical step. Once you implement too many individual things it's better to jump to the next level and implement one thing at a higher level of abstraction. No more need to explicitly limit which functions can be mapped to which buttons etc...

[Colin500]

And just think of the possibilities! Automatic in-camera AFMA? Somebody will write a script for that! Want to do an automatic sunrise picture sequence? Write a script that starts shooting when the light arrives! Want the two wheels to do aperture and ISO instead of exposure time and aperture? Just change the function that's called for the wheels! All buttons would be mappable to any script. You'd be really free to let your camera do whatever you want. If you don't have the programming experience, odds are, somebody else with the same requirements will, or you can find and pay somebody to do whatever you need. The internet would be full of scripts, and here on TDP there'd be a well-chosen selection of them :-)

[Joel Eade]

I attempted to download the new guide for 1DX autofocus. It opens fine but doesn't seem to actually download to my phone. Any ideas?

[neuroanatomist]

I attempted to download the new guide for 1DX autofocus. It opens fine but doesn't seem to actually download to my phone. Any ideas?

What phone?

It's a .pdf file, when accessing it on my iPhone I can tap to open it in iBooks, or download it on my Mac and sync it to the phone via iTunes.

Nice format, and the navigation is very good.

[Joel Eade]

It's an iPhone 5

[neuroanatomist]

It's an iPhone 5

Weird. Once the file opened in Safari, I tapped on it and got the prompt to 'Open in iBooks...' which saves it to the PDF section.

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

you have to wait for it to load, took a while for it to load on my iPhone 5 on AT&T LTE, if you still have problem give me your email and I'll send it to you.

[apersson850]

Basically allows changing parameters with one of the wheels instead of two while staying in M mode and keeping the chosen exposure constant.

Which is exactly what happens already, if you use P mode with locked exposure. So the functionality is almost there already in the camera, just not combined with a completely manual mode.

[Busted Knuckles]

Not sure this is a tip or trick, but....

How often should we expect to clean the sensor. 3,500 or so frames and several spots have appeared. Didn't seem to have this issue w/ my 5dIII. It took a long time to get spots on the sensor.

Thoughts?