manual settings

fotoadam · Sep 3, 2003

Ok, I have a canon rebel eos and I use 400 iso Fuji. When I use the manual settings I set the shutter speed on about 1000 just to caputre some good shots of water or such. But when I push the snap bottom (im still green and I dont know the name of it) to focus the shutter speed goes down to about 100 or 90... Is there a way to change the speed and keep it the same. It only does that in some cases and its a brand new camera... whats up..

Adam

oriecat · Sep 3, 2003

Well I am not sure what you mean by the "snap bottom"... oh unless you mean that you have it on autofocus, so you are pressing the shutter release button to get it to autofocus. Is it the same button you use to take the picture? If so, that's the shutter release... Anyway, I don't know anything about that kind of camera, only thing I can think is that perhaps you don't have enough light to take the pic at that speed, so it is altering the speed to compensate. Seems pretty weird tho, if you actually have it in manual mode, it should just do what you set it to.

Any eos owners out there who get this?

ksmattfish · Sep 3, 2003

If you have your camera set on manual exposure mode (somewhere in a LED window or on a dial it says "M") it will take the picture however you set the shutter and aperture.

Read your instructions and make sure you have everything right. If it's still causing problems you have a malfunctioning camera.

fotoadam · Sep 3, 2003

Ok, I took some pics today with my canon again. (yes the af button LOL) I noticed that when I pop up the flash 90 is the max shutter speed which I dont see why.. I dont have my booklet with me cause i left it at my gf's house, LOL.. But yeah, I'll take a look at it some more, thanks..

Adam

Bob_McBob · Sep 3, 2003

That's because 1/90s is the maximum flash sync speed for your camera. It won't take flash photos at anything faster than that.

Dew · Sep 4, 2003

im not absolutely sure, but it sounds like ur cam is not on full manual mode .. :scratch: ... i know when i go full manual (or my hubby).. my settings will blink in error to what the camera thinks it should be, but it doesnt change the settings ... i could even mix up the most screwed up settings and it wont change a thing, even with autofocus ...

i would get ahold of that manual or download one from their website .... u could have two settings, "full manual" or "perceived manual" ... but keep fighting, dont let ur camera tell u what to do

ksmattfish · Sep 4, 2003

1/90th is the fastest shutter speed for your camera in which the shutter opens all the way.

Focal plane shutters achieve high shutter speeds by moving a slit across the film frame instead of opening all the way and closing.

The Rebel may be "too advanced" to let you make the mistake of using a flash with too high of a shutter speed.

On older cameras (that will let you go ahead and make all the mistakes you want) you would get your pics back and only a strip would be flashed, and the rest would be underexposed.

Most modern film SLRs have a flash sync of around 1/100th, and a few get up to 1/250th. If you want a higher sync speed than that you'll need to get a camera with a leaf shutter.

Depending on your subject matter 1/90th should be fast enough, because the flash effectively makes the length of the exposure about 1/10,000th. Bright backgrounds can be troublesome here.

Bob_McBob · Sep 4, 2003

The reason why it's only 1/90s is because Canon intentionally crippled it. Any vertically travelling focal plane shutter can achieve x-sync speeds of at least 1/125s (hell, the 30 year old Canon EF I was playing around with the other day does). The way Canon sells their more expensive cameras to people is by successively crippling their cameras more as you go down in price. If all of their cameras included the features of their more expensive models, what would be the motivation to buy the more expensive ones? So you have to go to an Elan 7 to get decent x-sync speed, EOS 3 to get spot metering, etc. Same with their new 300D, which would be almost the same as the 10D without the firmware crippling. You'll see this sort of thing all the time in the camera industry, it's how they get people to pay the big bucks for top of the line cameras.