Nikon D7000'S AF Illumination

Hello all! i´ll be short on my question, i want to take a big mosaic panorama composed by 200 photos or so, in LOW, if not very low light conditions with my motorized head, so the main problem here is that AF doesn´t work in low light conditions, and the default AF light dies at 3 metters, and i need at least 30 metters. (And no, i can´t use manual focusing in this situation)

Is there any accesory to change the internal AF light ?

if not, i can attach a powerfull flashlight to the camera and with some electric knowledge i can make an electronical circuit so that the flashlight only lights when the camera´s AF light also pops

but for this the AF helping light must work every time, even when the camera thinks that the light conditions are "good", is this possible ?
any other ideas ?

Thank you!
Regards, Manuel.

Seems to me that you don't need AF at all?

On just about any lens I can think of, 30 meters and beyond is "infinity," so just go mf and set it at infinity and leave it!
--
Z-Man

I have to do 200 photos (300mm lens) becouse im doing a single photo composed of 200, my DOF is 80 centimeters, no more, thats why i need to AF on each photo.

Also, when the motorized head starts the panorama session, i can´t re-focus manually obviously

MFranquelo said:

I have to do 200 photos (300mm lens) becouse im doing a single photo composed of 200, my DOF is 80 centimeters, no more, thats why i need to AF on each photo.

Also, when the motorized head starts the panorama session, i can´t re-focus manually obviously

Click to expand...

300mm lens, target 30m distant, DOF .8m = aperture of f2 Why shoot at f2? Still can't think of a panoramic target that can't use manual focus (assuming stationary target) Good luck, BTW a laser pointer can often work better than a flash light.

Let me explain this a little better, this particular scene / panorama, its an abandoned cinema, and im positioned on the center of its hemisphere, so we have like 16 rows of seats, that is, about 30 meters of total depth, what i want to do is zoom in with my lens at 200mm or so, so the print output at 270dpi its 3 meters of width or so...

Im doing this with a motorized head mounted on my tripod, if i manual focus on the first row of seats, the lasting 15 rows of seats will be out of focus obviously, so each photo requires an AF.

i shoot at f11, i can´t remember the exact number of DOF that i have, 80 cm was an orientative number

i recaculated it now and at a distance of 3 meters (which is the distance of the first row of seats), with a focal length of 210mm , fnumber at 11, my dof is 4 meters, with a circle of confusion of 0,169cm in print. though this is irrelevant becouse im using AF in each photo, (it would be relevant is a single photo had a depth greater than 4metters, but thats not the case).

You know Clark Kent will be in town that day so you could ask him to help you out But seriously bon chance. I have learnt a lot from this thread and I would really love to see some of the results. This is one experiment I would love to emulate. Thank you for introducing this topic.

im thinking in a photosensitivy circuit that reacts to the camera’s AF auxiliary light, so when the AF’s auxiliary light pops, it activates an external powerfull flashlight/diffused laser attached to the camera and goes off when the AF auxiliary light goes off also.

• Update : i already made this and its working propertly

with my 18-105mm lens plus a x2 duplicador, the AF of my lens wasn´t working propertly (maybe there´s some kind of incompatibility ? i don´t know...) so i detached the x2 duplicator and the AF works as intended now.