Nikon 'A' - Critique: portraits and focus problems.

dale thorn · Apr 15, 2013

In 4 of these images (all except the woman holding the Nikon S9500), the main subject was slightly out of focus. None of these were posed, and there was no time to manually focus. Zone focus was not feasible because of different shooting distances (disguised by cropping) and the spontaneous captures.

In other words, the Nikon 'A' auto-focused very quickly in each case, but didn't focus where I expected it to, and there is no spot focus setting apparently.

http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/5235253614/albums/nikon-a-people

Edit: All of these were burst shots, and I was able to verify that motion blur was not the main problem (if it contributed at all).

Ray Sachs · Apr 15, 2013

I haven't had much experience or any issues with the auto focus except for landscapes and architectural shots and stuff, where its been fine. For this type of shooting, you can always use zone focus except in the lowest light, and even your indoor shots here seemed to have plenty. If you set your aperture to f4.5 (you can go for a smaller aperture and more depth of field in good light, but for your indoor scenes lets say you need to shoot at f4.5), if you set the focus to five feet, everything from about 3.5 to 8.5 feet will be in focus. If your subject is closer, just tweak the focus down to about four feet. If farther away, tweak it upwards to somewhere around 10 feet, where everything from about 5.5 feet all the way out to about 45 feet will be in focus. Learn your DOF for a few different apertures and zone focus will almost always work. Only in really horrible light will it not work (at least at high ISO), but AF generally won't either, so you're sort of down to guessing or trying to use manual focus in critical focus mode at that point.

-Ray
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vkyr2 · Apr 15, 2013

Did you tried face priority AF for those?

dale thorn · Apr 15, 2013

vkyr2 said:
vkyr2 wrote:

Did you tried face priority AF for those?

Lifer · Apr 19, 2013

dale thorn said:
dale thorn wrote:

In 4 of these images (all except the woman holding the Nikon S9500), the main subject was slightly out of focus. None of these were posed, and there was no time to manually focus. Zone focus was not feasible because of different shooting distances (disguised by cropping) and the spontaneous captures.

In other words, the Nikon 'A' auto-focused very quickly in each case, but didn't focus where I expected it to, and there is no spot focus setting apparently.

http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/5235253614/albums/nikon-a-people

Edit: All of these were burst shots, and I was able to verify that motion blur was not the main problem (if it contributed at all).

"Normal Area-AF - Use for pin point focus on a selected spot in the frame" according to page 76 of the Nikon A manual.

dale thorn · Apr 19, 2013

Lifer said:
Lifer wrote:

Lifer said:

dale thorn wrote:

In 4 of these images (all except the woman holding the Nikon S9500), the main subject was slightly out of focus. None of these were posed, and there was no time to manually focus. Zone focus was not feasible because of different shooting distances (disguised by cropping) and the spontaneous captures.

In other words, the Nikon 'A' auto-focused very quickly in each case, but didn't focus where I expected it to, and there is no spot focus setting apparently.

http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/5235253614/albums/nikon-a-people

Edit: All of these were burst shots, and I was able to verify that motion blur was not the main problem (if it contributed at all).

Click to expand...

"Normal Area-AF - Use for pin point focus on a selected spot in the frame" according to page 76 of the Nikon A manual.

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Nikon 'A' - Critique: portraits and focus problems.

dale thorn

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Ray Sachs

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Ray Sachs Assorted Photographs

vkyr2

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dale thorn

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Lifer

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dale thorn

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