May 6, 2011, 12:24
Indeed.
You'll hear a lot of apocryphal stuff out there: most of such talk is pure pilot error and absolutely nothing to do with the lenses..and most certainly not the one to which you refer.
People sometimes have problems because they do not know what they're doing, have not understood what the camera or lens is capable of, and mistakenlly program either to do something too advanced or particular for their needs.
I have read several scare stories that turn out to be nothing more than brainlessness on the part of a user: one such area of daftness is inability to use a basic focus-recompose technique at full aperture: they mis-focus, as the AF-point is doing something like moving about..because they inadvertently told it to...and then they blame it on the lens instead of their own error. Another howler: when you have class lenses and cameras(the 7D for instance), one has a whole raft of thing available the manufacturers have decided we want....a key one is multiple focus points, like 19 or 45 or whatever.
In some Canon combos (mine), my 70-200 IS and body decided it would be helpful to default to 5 zillion focus points and to track between them if I wobbled the lens about: if it thinks I've got the onset of Parkinson's Disease, it ever-so-helpfully expands the amount of available AF points, deciding to use any darn AF point it wants on my behalf.
Or rather it did..., until I went into Custom Functions, gave it a Jolly Good Thrashing, bitch-slapped it and ordered it to pull itself together or else. It now just uses the one, the nice central one that I focus with...and I use one button to focus, another one for exposure lock...using the 2 together is asking for trouble.
The lens is fine, the camera is fine...there are no "incompatibility" issues whatsoever, apart from the basic one of matching a cretin to a camera which needs a brain to make it work.
There are, though, issues with old Sigma primes...and the user will recognise these by the obvious recalcitrance in the Sigma to shoot at anything other than wide open.
You are spot on, photohobo: I myself have seen such passing blogs or Flickr comments, that generate panic as above.
You're quite right to check it out with your chums here...we'll look after you mate! Besides, what Matthew doesn't know can be written on a postage stamp.
You'll hear a lot of apocryphal stuff out there: most of such talk is pure pilot error and absolutely nothing to do with the lenses..and most certainly not the one to which you refer.
People sometimes have problems because they do not know what they're doing, have not understood what the camera or lens is capable of, and mistakenlly program either to do something too advanced or particular for their needs.
I have read several scare stories that turn out to be nothing more than brainlessness on the part of a user: one such area of daftness is inability to use a basic focus-recompose technique at full aperture: they mis-focus, as the AF-point is doing something like moving about..because they inadvertently told it to...and then they blame it on the lens instead of their own error. Another howler: when you have class lenses and cameras(the 7D for instance), one has a whole raft of thing available the manufacturers have decided we want....a key one is multiple focus points, like 19 or 45 or whatever.
In some Canon combos (mine), my 70-200 IS and body decided it would be helpful to default to 5 zillion focus points and to track between them if I wobbled the lens about: if it thinks I've got the onset of Parkinson's Disease, it ever-so-helpfully expands the amount of available AF points, deciding to use any darn AF point it wants on my behalf.
Or rather it did..., until I went into Custom Functions, gave it a Jolly Good Thrashing, bitch-slapped it and ordered it to pull itself together or else. It now just uses the one, the nice central one that I focus with...and I use one button to focus, another one for exposure lock...using the 2 together is asking for trouble.
The lens is fine, the camera is fine...there are no "incompatibility" issues whatsoever, apart from the basic one of matching a cretin to a camera which needs a brain to make it work.
There are, though, issues with old Sigma primes...and the user will recognise these by the obvious recalcitrance in the Sigma to shoot at anything other than wide open.
You are spot on, photohobo: I myself have seen such passing blogs or Flickr comments, that generate panic as above.
You're quite right to check it out with your chums here...we'll look after you mate! Besides, what Matthew doesn't know can be written on a postage stamp.
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