Mirror Lock up

I have heard that mirror lock up will help with crisp night shots. I see the

setting in the menu on the camera but it will not let me do what everyone says

to do, which is to press the sutter release twice. Once for mirror lock up and

one to take the shot. Am I not understanding what to do or not looking in the

right place on the camera. I have a Nikon D50 which has a setting for mirror

lock up on the LCD screen. Is that where I put it in mirror lick up mode? My

question is, how do you use this and take a shot at the same time? Help would be

appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Russell

The mirror lock up in the d50 is or cleaning only, as far as I know. The funstion will lift the mirror, exposing the sutter, freezing the cmera. If youtry and take a pic, it will reset itself.

hope that helps, and hope that's accurate. Nick.

Also,

 

You're talking about night shots. That's not where you really want M.L.U. anyway, that is, if

you are talking about exposures measured in seconds and even minutes. The Mirror shake

only affects the first moment of the exposure, so for a very long exposure... useless...

You would have to get a D200 or better to get true mirror lock up.

Mirror slap primarily affects the sharpness of images at shutter speeds around 1/15 sec, +- 1 to 2 stops in each direction. If you are shooting at a very slow shutter speed, e.g. longer than 1/2 sec, any vibration from the mirror slap only accounts for a fraction of the total exposure time such that its effect is very small anyway.

 

Several of us have run a number of tests on cameras such as the F100 vs. F5, D100, etc. at shutter speeds around 1/15 sec. under critical 1:1 macro situations. At least I see no visible difference between using mirror lock up or not. Therefore, IMO the importance of mirror lock up is greatly exaggerated.

It really depends on the size of the final image whether mirror bounce can be detected. I won several bets a few years ago where 3 exposures were taken, all at 1/1000th (one thousandth) of a second. Handheld, on a tripod, on a tripod with the mirror locked up. For large prints (around 30x40), there was a noticable improvement in sharpness as we moved across those methods.