A9 face and eye priority in real time tracking not working

long term A9 user for sports with latest up date but when shooting with target of face wearing cap with tracking and priority for face and eye engaged the focus will move to face without cap in background. Have tried all various choices of mode and focus sensitivity and read all Sony material. Only solution to maintain focus of face wearing cap is to only treat as object. Any solutions would be welcome.

got any full-size ooc jpegs to post, that show this issue?

please don't post edited pics.

I have learned that glasses, even mirror sunglasses seems to work fine with Face/Eye AF but hats are problematic at times.

Use the small focus box and put it on the face under the out sticking cap flap (or what ever it is called in English). You can have Face/Eye AF running at the same time, if it picks up it does, if not you still hit with the small focus box.



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I find the facial detection on the a9 pretty weak compared to other software. It's far too easy to make a face undetectable. I'm guessing to prevent false positives in a professional environment. They should give the user the ability to set a threshold for detection though.

Thanks for the advice. I have tried small box. Focus is fixed on face with cap which is 20 m from camera, but when head is lowered the peak of the cap obscures eyes and part of face and the focus immediately jumps to a face without cap about 5 m behind. I understood from Sony literature that if head turns the eye focus remains on the back of the head. Not in this case. Will keep trying. If main target is without hat the focus remains on face and or eye of target and shot is perfect.

Focus Target was face of bowler delivering wood wearing cap at centre. As soon as he lowered his head and peak of cap obscured his eyes the focus moved immediately to the bowler with spectacles and no cap standing behind. Flexible spot small and stickiness value from 1 to 5. AF-C and face and eye priority. Any advice on how to retain face with cap in focus would be welcome.

that pic, at 3,936 × 2,624, is a good example of why I asked for full-size pics.

did you crop it? is it resized? etc.

because eyeaf and even face detection needs the subject matter to be a certain minimum size in the frame, in order to recognize it... so if you cropped that shot, the face is even smaller in the frame.

it's difficult for face detection to work when the face is at such a steep angle, largely obscured by the bill of the hat.

I wouldn't try to use eyeaf there.

Thanks MILC for the response. The photo was taken with camera in cropped mode to increase size of face. It is OOC. Other photos taken in FF. But the face is smaller and result is same.

It appears that face priority on the A9 cannot be used where face is temporarily and partly obscured by peak of cap. It immediately jumps to a nearby full face. Any suggestions for using face priority is such circumstances would be welcome. Meanwhile I will try all options available and read all available literature.