RTFM
When I bought my NEX-5, I had it posted to Marcus so that I could collect it from him when I flew in to visit. I skimmed the manual, and browsed through some of the core settings menus to get a feel for the camera. I knew that I learned enough to be dangerous, but not highly proficient.
After I returned home, Eric mucked about with the camera, and I had forgotten that he had upgraded the firmware on it. I had a vague recollection that he did, and I remember this because I think pano was only enabled in the newer version, but I didn’t think to check what other nuggets of awesome might have been included.
You can see where this is going.
One of the things that shat me about the NEX-5 was that manual focus is an absolute pain in the donkey-ass-mule. You either end up squinting at the display, which while a reasonable size, doesn’t help if you’re trying to ensure that something very small is in focus. Certainly there’s Manual Assist mode, but what that does is zoom you in 7x or 14x so you can move the camera around, focus and then zoom back out to compose the rest of the shot. However, when you’re that zoomed in and don’t have the steady hands of a surgeon[1], the view you get is caffeine and red cordial[2] jittery.
The other thing that bothered me is what I discovered when I was trying to shoot that moon picture for {010}, when I couldn’t get the NEX to shutter with the 2x teleconverter attached because it couldn’t recognise the lens.
Well, every now and then since I bought the NEX, I’d google to check the prices on the silly viewfinder attachment which is effectively a very small screen you put your eye up to. Tonight, I did this again. It’s still a ridiculous price.
So I figured maybe I should google tips on manually focusing with the NEX.
This is when I learned about this feature called Peaking which will highlight edges to indicate when something is in focus. “OMG”, I thought. “I Must Find This”. I pull out the NEX and start scrolling madly through the settings to find and enable Peaking.
While I was frantically scrolling through the settings, I also found an option labelled Release w/o Lens. When I was trying to look for this option before, I looked in all the other menu options other than Setup. I cry.
Moral of the story and lesson of the day: RTFM more thoroughly, and read firmware release notes.
[1] Actually, I’ve seen some surgeons with pretty bad tremors…
[2] For any Americans, by cordial I mean this rather than something alcoholic.
