Photo Answers
Flummoxed by f-stops? in a muddle over macro?
Send your question to digitalcamera@futurenet.com and let us provide you with a solution
Free yourself
My mirrorless camera won’t shoot when free-lensing. Is there a way round this?
Dave Trott
Free-lensing is a technique that can lead to happy creative accidents.
A It depends on which model you have – but in a lot of cases, yes, it’s easy to switch the camera so that it allows you to fire the shutter with the lens detached from the body. Look through your menus for Shoot Without Lens: if you have this, just enable it and away you go!
Free-lensing is a technique where you remove the lens from the camera body and hold it just slightly away from the aperture in the camera’s body. It’s fun, but it does have potential risks such as dust reaching the sensor and you dropping the lens while you’re messing about!
Manually set the exposure first, then switch the camera off, remove the lens from the body and switch the camera back on. Now you can just use the electronic viewfinder or Live View to see the effect you are getting, which is something akin to a tilt-and-shift camera or a Lensbaby. You are basically changing the normal plane of focus. You’ll need to try and move the lens slightly until you get
