[clackers]

What a week it's been. A couple of delivery guys were on my street the other day and asked me what time it was. I told them it was between 8am and 1pm.

Then I came to believe my wife was secretly putting glue on my antique weapon collection.

She denies it, but I'm sticking to my guns!

On with this week's tip ... in Pentax Live View, a feature called focus peaking works as an aid to manual focusing. You can toggle this on or off in the Contrast Detection AF menu item.

The areas of greatest contrast are outlined in white when enabled. Intelligence is required, these are not necessarily in focus, they might instead be highlights in the scene. You can choose a wide aperture then focus back and forth to see the effect.

I do prefer the implementation on my Sonys because I can switch to red as the outline, which I reckon is more distinguishable. But a very nice feature on recent models like the KP, GR III, K3-III and I guess all future Pentaxes is 'extract edge' mode - you can see below an example from the Ricoh website.

To finish with, there's the story of the guy here in Australia who buys a farm and on the day he moves in, his neighbour introduces himself.

'I'm having a party tonight,' says the neighbour. 'Why don't you come over? Plenty of booze, sex and drugs.'

'Great!' says the new bloke, 'Thanks very much'.

Later that day the new bloke rings his neighbour and says, 'I forgot to ask - what time tonight?'

'Come any time you like,' replies the neighbour, 'It's only me and you.'


The rest of the series here: Clackers' Beginners Tips (Collected) - PentaxForums.com

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[Michail_P]

One of the best features of any camera. So important! Red or not, it's still pretty clear on my screen. Very nice of you to share.

[ramseybuckeye]

And even more useful when combined with magnification.

[rogerstg]

Extract edge is very handy for macro work and shooting wildlife in thickets (focus until the bird's outline appears despite all the surrounding twigs that distract AF)
I've also been using focus peaking for AF fine adjustment. No test shots are needed, just focus through OVF, then switch to LV with focus peaking to see the relationship to the focus range. For example, a small, high contrast subject on a lawn, viewed from an elevated position works great for telephoto lenses. I usually do the ovf focus/lv inspection cycle a handful of times to see if there is a trend, and proceed accordingly. It's pretty quick.