I want to hear about your brutally honest R7 AF tracking experiences

charlyw64 wrote:

Dave C 150 wrote:

Yes, some good points there. I am working hard at trying to find improvements and I think I am. To what extent it is caused by difficulties with an EV compared to OV for older users with less good eyesight like me I don't know. In this thread the OP asked for brutally honest views on our R7 AF tracking experiences. SO those sniping at people saying by effectively they are inexperienced or not understanding the settings aren't that helpful. My view is that it is a bigger learning experience than most were led to believe from reviewers and to get equivalent results to say the D500 or 7D mk2 for BIF takes more effort and research. Nevertheless I take your point about "overthinking" some of the settings. You have to start somewhere and I may have made the mistake of setting up in the way some wildlife "experts" suggested (why wouldn't you?) rather than trying it out of the box.

The problem is that those experts (no need to doubt their credentials) do have so much more general experience that they will for example pan with the correct speed because they trained their panning movement for a long time. This will have implications on the quality of the autofocus - because it makes it easier for the image analysing software to identify the subject (it's basically at the same placement within the image for most if not all of the shots).

As I explained in my analysis of the possible fail points in the series you can not expect the specialised settings to work out of the box because you usually don't have that much experience. For example when I go to the Spa F1 GP and pan with the F1 cars in the 180° Bruxelles corner at the top of the hill I needed to adjust who is driving because depending on the driver they will drive this corner with a different speed profile. For a long time it was Sebastian Vettel wo was the hardest to keep track of because he drove his Red Bull with a progressive speed increase through that 180°, all other drivers were basically taking that curve at constant speed, only accelerating at the very end of it. So if I didn't realise that it wasn't his team mate but Vettel that I had in my sights my panning speed was off and the shots were unrecoverable. So I had to resort to listen to how the cars approached (luckily Vettel had a distinctive gear change pattern on approach to the corner, yeah to those unsynchronised gear changes, so I knew it was him approaching) and then adjust my panning accordingly.

I would suggest to approach it with a KISS (keep it simple stup*d) principle at first and let the camera do its thing. Concentrate on keeping the subject in frame (slight difference in viewfinder and EVF is the EVF lag - it's small but noticeable - I used to keep both eyes open, now I am considering getting an eye patch like some of the biathlon athletes use that don't want to close their second eye while aiming) and if you get a series of failed shots then take all the methods at hand (AF point display, time information, case, case modifications, tracking settings) and try to find the fail points like I did with the series from that website and then adjust. Do not adjust for the sake of trying something different, often the lesson learned by doing so is not helpful because then you don't have any logic to go with that decision.

Again, I don't disagree with your points but it makes assumptions like people suddenly can't pan. I think there should be more emphasis on general things perhaps like EV lag, lighter body and lens. because many of the people, like me, are very experienced bird photographers going back many many years. My panning worked fine before. I swapped from Pentax to Nikon and then different bodies and lenses and never struggled after a day or two of setting up with getting the best out of them. I think we have to accept that to get the R7 to perform as brilliantly as it should it is a big step change in learning settings and possibly technique compared to upgrading DSLR systems. Maybe more like going from a "point and shoot" to an SLR !