Masai Mara Some Sharing and Musings....

R V C wrote:

C Sean wrote:

What do you think is the best method to get the animal's eyes or face in focus? Normally I focus on the point I want and recompose the camera before firing off the shutter. Usually I use the center one focus point to achieve this.

Hey Sean

That's exactly what I do, keep the focus point on the eye. With the greater dof with m43 it's much easier to get the eyes in focus. I generally use the arrow button to move the focus point around rather than focus and recompose. The large mammals don't move fast and you will mostly come across them sitting. That's why the giraffe and ostrich are so tough to photograph. Their eyes / head is so far removed from the body.

Just a small technical point on the technique of aiming the camera to focus directly on the subject, and then recomposing. This results in the focus plane being FARTHER from the subject than the subject actually is, in the final composition. Draw yourself a little diagram (Basically, your focus distance becomes the hypotenuse of a right triangle, one leg of which is the distance to true focal plane. And, ahem, the legs are alway shorter than the hypotenuse.)

Under most circumstances, this won't matter that much, but if you are in a situation of really thin depth of field, then moving the focus point on the framing you want will be more accurate. The new long lenses (300 f/ 4 or 400 f/6.3) may bring this into play more. I'm hoping to get really convenient focal point moving (e.g., tracking with your finger on the display while looking thru the EVF) on the E-M1 II. I almost always use EVF, so would have to use arrow keys, now, which is horribly inefficient and slow for me.