Drive mode

Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke extensively about the decisive moment, that one particular moment that happens that is the perfect decisive expression of the scene or event. Because he was a genius, he was often able to fire his camera at that perfect decisive moment. For the rest of us, there is Drive mode. In Drive mode, as you hold down the Shutter button, the camera will continue to snap frames one after another. Drive mode is a great tool for shooting in fast moving environments-- sports, street shooting, nature shots. But it can also be ideal for portraiture, when a person's face is making lots of tiny subtle changes and you're not sure which is the ideal expression.

However, you cannot use Drive mode indefinitely; that is, you can't just hold the button down and expect the camera to always keep shooting. When you take a picture, the camera has to move a lot of data around and do a lot of computation. You can take pictures faster than your camera can get them written to the media card, so your camera has a memory buffer that can hold a certain number of pictures. As you shoot, your images can be quickly thrown into that buffer. Then the camera can start the process of copying images from the buffer to the memory card, while you continue to snap away.

If the buffer fills, then your camera will cease to be able to take pictures and you'll have to wait for it to empty out before you can start shooting again. To configure Drive mode, you just press the Drive button that's here on top of the camera. And you see that the screen here goes blank, except for my Drive icon. That single square means that I get one frame whenever I press the Shutter button. But once I press the Drive mode button, I can turn the main dial and I cycle through a whole bunch of other icons here. First one is High-speed Drive mode, then Regular Speed or Low-speed Drive mode, then I get a Self-timer, and then I get a Two Second Self-timer.

So I simply cycle through to each one of those things to select them, and half-press my Shutter button to set the Drive mode. You may be thinking, if I've got a fast drive speed and a slower drive speed, why would I ever use the slow one? Isn't faster inherently better? Not necessarily. With a faster drive speed, you get less variation between frames. So sometimes, you're going to want to switch to the slower one if you're dealing with a situation that isn't changing as quickly. Facial expressions, for example, are usually better with a slower drive speed.

If you shoot them with a faster drive speed, you're not going to see a lot of change from one picture to another. If you're trying to stop a bicyclist at a very particular moment in time, then you probably want to go with a faster drive speed to be sure that you really get that razor thin slice of time that's going to make the decisive moment.