help, poor T3i autofocus performance

RedFox88 wrote:

Beans37 wrote:

I'll explain an example: I was taking a bunch of test portraits of a person indoors in low but not very low lightning, 4.5 feet away at 18mm, 1/50-1/80 shutter, f3.5-f4.5, flash, ISO 400.

The kit lens at f/3.5 is wide open and won't be that sharp.

Which dial mode are you in ? If green square mode that is continuous autofocus so you can't lock autofocus on an eye.

I put the focus point on the eyes to focus, the flash fires a few times to focus, yet about 1/4 photos would come out sharp. I went up as high as 1/100 shutter and f4.5 but still very high blur rate.

If this is your first slr camera you have a lot to learn. Depth of field with the longer focal lengths that am slr camera has by default gets less in focus. You need to know how to make the camera get your desired results.

You would have been better off buying a G7 X or G9 X.

Telling someone who is still in the process of learning about how to work their camera that the solution to the problem is to buy a lower end camera is some of the worst advice I have ever heard.

Beans37 - perhaps you could share some examples? There could be many reasons for not achieving sharp photos:

- Your expectations are high for the camera and lens combination. The kit lens is known not to be one of the sharper lenses around, especially wide open.

- Having IS turned on if your camera is on a tripod (It actually creates camera shake)

- Issue of depth of field being shallower at wider apertures (At f/4.5 on a crop sensor this is unlikely to be a big an issue - if you were shooting at f/1.8 it would)

- Your model is moving in the time it takes to attain focus and take the shot

- Possible defective lens?