Interesting Article on Focus-Recompose

[stevegreen]

After reading how Radiohead manages his mass of focus points I have just been doing a bit of reading up on the focus point selection on the 5D and stumbled across this article which some here might find interesting.

I am going to Wenlock Olympics on Sunday and needed to get a grip of focus points as there will be lots of action going on and I don't want blurred shots!

[jenufa]

Originally Posted by stevegreen

After reading how Radiohead manages his mass of focus points I have just been doing a bit of reading up on the focus point selection on the 5D and stumbled across this article which some here might find interesting.

I am going to Wenlock Olympics on Sunday and needed to get a grip of focus points as there will be lots of action going on and I don't want blurred shots!

Interesting read Steve.

"If you focus-recompose in such conditions and get consistently back-focused shots, your camera's autofocus calibration is probably just fine. It's your bad technique that most likely the real culprit".

That will be me then

[Jitetsu]

Very handy Steve. I've been doing the focus-recompose thing a lot. I don't tend to use the outer focus points and this explains why in the last few days i've been a lot more hit and miss with some animal portraits than I expected to be. I had been pinning it down on the problems of getting focus on a black cat. The problem no doubt arises especially on that one because I absolutely have to focus on the eyes initially as it won't even get a focus lock on fur and also the fact that i'm now using a 70-200 f/2.8 which is so much less forgiving with its depth of field.

I'll be sure to try out those 50 other focus points tonight. Perhaps not all 50 though.

[Tobers]

Good article.

Generally I'll use the central (and most sensitive/accurate) focus point as much as possible. If I'm shooting in portrait orientation I'll swap to use one of the side focus points. I dont do many wide aperture close-up shots but you can see what the author is getting at.

Basically, your camera is a tool and you need to know how to get the best out of it. I guess the message is "at wide apertures, use the focus point closest to the thing you want to focus on".

[py6km]

This is one of the reasons that I was disappointed with the number of AF points and their disposition in the 40D. I always use the centre point on an eye for portrait type shots and then crop to get the framing I like (which means I can't always get as close as I'd like initially). If more time were available for shots, I'd pick best the point manually, but there's rarely time for that when people/things move around quickly, and my 9 AF points don't leave an awful lot of scope for particularly creative framing.