Continuation: OM-1: Imprecision of AF Target?

Thread ran out...

I thought I posted this but can't find it. I'm having no problem asking the OM-1 to focus on nearest, farthest, and subjects in the middle fast and accurately with many objects to focus on. No matter where I wanted to focus it didn't fail in 20 tries of very casual shooting. Camera settings and lens are what I had on the camera when I put it in the bag after I last time used it. I changed nothing. I shot these in RAW, sharpened them, and converted them to jpegs to post. I could not replicate the problem others have been reporting. The AF system worked perfectly no matter where I pointed it in both SAF and CAF.

Here are all 20 photos. Not a single miss. It focused exactly where I pointed it.











































--
Author of "The Pelican Squadron" - Harvey Gene Sherman
https://www.amazon.com/Pelican-Squadron-Tale-Internet-Bubble-ebook/dp/B08FCY6V7Y
"A great photo can have mediocre IQ, but a mediocre photo cannot be saved by great IQ"

Harvey

Try it in low light.

A

ahaslett said:

Harvey

Try it in low light.

A

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And they are all conveniently too far apart. Put them next to each other.

I shut the blinds. Not low light but a lot lower. Shutter speed is 10X longer for all but the last one that is a 10-second exposure hand held. Everything in that one suffers from motion blur but you can see the focus is at the back wall and it isn't distracted by anything in the foreground. I used a 64ND Live filter for that one. When you use ND filters the camera won't allow me to select CAF. With ND filters, its SAF only. You can see the DOF is pretty shallow even at f/4.



































--
Author of "The Pelican Squadron" - Harvey Gene Sherman
https://www.amazon.com/Pelican-Squadron-Tale-Internet-Bubble-ebook/dp/B08FCY6V7Y
"A great photo can have mediocre IQ, but a mediocre photo cannot be saved by great IQ"

A random spread/distance. Why don't you give it a try? Have a camera? Have a kitchen? I'm not your lap dog or lab monkey.

How about this? Make sure the subjects are not too close together when you take the photos? Or if the subjects are too close together it might confuse the camera. If the guy does his own test.

I think it can be a problem if they overlap. Then the AF system sees one subject and picks the closest spot with good contrast without understanding you want to focus on one of the other subjects. But close seems to be no problem with SAF. I didn't try CAF.

Subjects photographed at a 45-degree angle with a 1/1.4" gap between them.









--
Author of "The Pelican Squadron" - Harvey Gene Sherman
https://www.amazon.com/Pelican-Squadron-Tale-Internet-Bubble-ebook/dp/B08FCY6V7Y
"A great photo can have mediocre IQ, but a mediocre photo cannot be saved by great IQ"

EZGritz said:

Surely the focus target indicator should be a reasonable representation of the actual targeted area? Otherwise, what would be the point of it?

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The AF mark in OM Workspace really only shows where the AF Target was pointed, not its size or shape.

Where the representation in the viewfinder is concerned, I agree with your sentiment but some Oly cameras had much larger AF targets than what their EVF would show. This was true for the E-M1 series, I do not know if the OM-1's have the same issue. If they do, it would likely explain your findings.

If you find that the single point AF target still latches on to objects outside of the expected range, another thing that you could try is to set up a 'custom' AF target. I do not have an OM-1 to try it on, but maybe that'll allow you to make it smaller than 'small'.

I tried some with "Single" and some with "Small" focus area. Same result. It worked for me every time. This is the easiest, most accurate, and fastest-focusing camera I ever used. I don't understand why anybody is having any trouble with it. I am not having the problems and there is nothing special about me. There are many more experienced and more learned photographers in the previous thread.

What a long thread.

Like many other posters, I was unable to reproduce DeltaFoxtrot's problem, even using the painfully slow-to-focus Olympus 60mm macro lens.

One of the original responders to DeltaFoxTrot's problem, iwaddo, gave a list of things for him to check; Release Priority was mentioned.

I checked my settings for Release Priority under the AF section of the main menu. Release Priority has two sub-menus; the first is for S-AF and the second is for C-AF/C-AF+TR. Both of my settings were set to Off. Off is the default for S-AF, but defaults to On for C-AF/C-AF+TR.

I reran the test setting the C-AF Release Priority to On, and the image was out-of-focus. I then set C-AF Release Priority to Off, ran another test, and the focus was fine.

I also tested focus using a fast lens, the OM 20mm 1.4. It focused correctly with both settings (Off or On).

BTW, the current firmware level for the 60mm is 1.2, so you might want to check your setting.

Howard

EZGritz said:

I tried some with "Single" and some with "Small" focus area. Same result. It worked for me every time. This is the easiest, most accurate, and fastest-focusing camera I ever used. I don't understand why anybody is having any trouble with it. I am not having the problems and there is nothing special about me. There are many more experienced and more learned photographers in the previous thread.

Click to expand...

I rarely find focus problems with a distinctive image with detail on the target.

I do find that the OM1.1 sometimes indicates that the camera is focused on the target when it is actually focused on something else. I know when that is likely to happen and modify my approach to minimize the problem.

A good example where this is likely to be a problem is photographing Black Bear (small focus point, Subject AI). They are dark and have little detail. In addition, Black Bear do not like high outside temperatures, so they tend to be out in the late afternoon/evening, rarely in good light, so illumination will be low and you will tend to have a high ISO.

If the bear is stationary, it is easy to simply check focus before exposure. However, if the bear is moving, this is far more difficult to confirm when the EVF indicates focus on the target. My solution is to shoot short bursts unless the head/eye is clearly visible. While it is difficult to see if the bear is clearly in focus, I can often see if the background is in focus and stop the burst. If the background is in focus, I stop and shoot another short burst. If the bear turns so that the head/eye is turned toward me, then I simply continue the burst because I find that the camera is likely to correct focus.

The first image (#1) below is the fifth (last) image in a short burst, all images where focus but the eye is not visible, so I stopped and shot a new short burst. The next image (#2 next burst) is out of focus and all 4 images in the burst are out of focus even though the camera indicated the bear was in focus. However, the background is in focus, so I stopped the burst.

The next burst starts out of focus, but the camera starts to correct focus as the bear turns its head toward me on the fourth image of the burst (image #3 below), so I continue the burst since the bears head is now facing me. By the fifth image (#4 below) the camera has returned focus to the bear and all images after this image were in focus until I stopped the burst after 34 images.

All cameras sometimes fail to provide the image you want, you need do understand the situations where potential failures are likely and adapt your techniques to maximize probability of success.




#1 end of burst with in focus bear




#2 first image of new burst with all four images of burst out of focus




#3 fourth image of new burst as bear turns toward camera and camera begins focus correction




#4 fifth image of burst with all images through 34th image of burst in focus



--
drj3

EZGritz said:

A random spread/distance. Why don't you give it a try? Have a camera? Have a kitchen? I'm not your lap dog or lab monkey.

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Well that's a bit silly. Of course I have a camera. But it's not an OM1 and it doesn't exhibit the issue that was clearly shown in the other thread. Another point is that at least one of the recent posters in the other thread was using caf. And in all the threads I recall about this issue, it was with caf, not saf.

EZGritz said:

How about this? Make sure the subjects are not too close together when you take the photos? Or if the subjects are too close together it might confuse the camera. If the guy does his own test.

Click to expand...

I don't have the luxury of shifting my subjects around when I am out and about. But then again I don't have the issue.

I see many posts where a user has an issue with his camera or whatever device. Others chime in with "well I don't see it therefore it doesn't exist". It's weird logic and doesn't help the OP in sorting their problem.

Silly is when you don't have the camera but you comment on what it can or cannot do.

Shooting in bursts is a good way to do it. I do that sometimes at road race tracks when a car has little contrast on it, flat black or white wiht no contrasting color and no advertising. There is a way to have the camera focus properly on the first shot and some setting that it won't but often adjusts and gets it right on the second one. So much to learn and remember with this camera, I remember this but not how to set it to have it focus well on the first shot. Have to look for it.

When you are out and about you should be able to shift yourself around.

EZGritz said:

I tried some with "Single" and some with "Small" focus area. Same result. It worked for me every time.

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I think that the tests that you did earlier in this thread are not really representative of DeltaFoxtrot's problem.

For that, you'd have to position two spice tins approximately half a foot apart, and shoot them from a position such that they seem to stand side by side (just touching each other) in your viewfinder. Your AF target box should rest only on the farthest tin, but still be close to the other tin, too.

If your OM-1 behaves like DF's, it will focus on the nearest tin even though the AF target box is only on the farthest tin.

EZGritz said:

When you are out and about you should be able to shift yourself around.

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Oh excuse me little bird in a tree, there's a twig a bit too close and my focus keeps grabbing it. Will you please just wait there while I move a few feet to one side? Thanks a bunch.

I think you are right.

Good chance there is some setup that will cause every camera to fail and every test to be faulty. In the real world, you don't look for that or run into it often if you know how to use your great and you stay within its limits.

You move around and take photos. If the camera succeeds at that most of the time it's a good camera. Cherry-picking a situation where it fails is not a good test of the camera, or of the way it is used in photography. Photography is not a contest to find a camera that will never fail under any circumstance so it does not matter if I replicated his test, nor does failure in his test mean anything to me. The curious thing is why it means enough to him to send the camera back when it is a proven fact that it works well as a photography tool for most people in most situations, and some pretty extreme situations. It's like sending back the bottle of wine because it isn't quite dry enough so it's a 99-point bottle and not a 100-point bottle. Does that make it a bad wine worthy of publicising it?

What are we to believe? It's a bad camera? It doesn't work? Get rid of it? I don't think that is what he would say even though he did it. The camera didn't work for him as well as his Nikon does so he sent it back. That's fair enough but professional macro photographers are switching to the system to use the OM-1 and the 90mm and 60mm macro lenses. The images I've seen are stunning and the photographers are gushing about it. That's what I believe. It still isn't perfect but can you take a good photo with it? Yes, you can.

I didn't try to replicate his failure. I just threw some objects on a countertop and took some casual photos to see what happens. I just pulled it out of the bag with whatever lens was on it and whatever the settings were. No effort. Point and click and 36 in focus photos.

All I can conclude from this is it works for me. What are you saying? It's a bad test so it's a bad camera or it doesn't prove it's a good camera? No. And yes. What test, what photos have you taken with it? What are the results?

--
Author of "The Pelican Squadron" - Harvey Gene Sherman
https://www.amazon.com/Pelican-Squadron-Tale-Internet-Bubble-ebook/dp/B08FCY6V7Y
"A great photo can have mediocre IQ, but a mediocre photo cannot be saved by great IQ"

Perfection in birding? No camera will make perfect photos every time. The best ones miss sometimes even when there are no branches. I know someone who takes 4,000 photos in a park near me with his Canon R5 and one of their best lenses, I think a 500mm f/2,8 prime, because he's so picky he is happy with only 20% of them. I'm not that picky. I think all of his photos are excellent. But I can take some that he can't because I have ProCap and he has to use a tripod. I'm way more mobile. I have the shot when he's still swinging his camera around and moving around it - too late to take the photo. I'll take the smaller, lighter kit. He can have the birds in the bushes (but I capture them too anyway.)

EZGritz said:

Perfection in birding? No camera will make perfect photos every time. The best ones miss sometimes even when there are no branches. I know someone who takes 4,000 photos in a park near me with his Canon R5 and one of their best lenses, I think a 500mm f/2,8 prime, because he's so picky he is happy with only 20% of them. I'm not that picky. I think all of his photos are excellent. But I can take some that he can't because I have ProCap and he has to use a tripod. I'm way more mobile. I have the shot when he's still swinging his camera around and moving around it - too late to take the photo. I'll take the smaller, lighter kit. He can have the birds in the bushes (but I capture them too anyway.)

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My buddy also have been using Canon for years and his wildlife life set up is R5 and 600mm F4. We have been shooting together for years. It is his back issue that got him to start looking at my system. I loaned him my OM1.1 with 200mm F2.8 and 300mm F4. In 2 weeks time, he just bought OM1.2 and 200mm F2.8 and is going to get 150-400mm F4.5 lens soon.

So far he is super happy. I know as soon as he sell his big lens, he will get the big 150--400mm F4.5 lens. He will keep his R5 with his smaller lens for landscape and people.

Doxa750 said:

EZGritz said:

Perfection in birding? No camera will make perfect photos every time. The best ones miss sometimes even when there are no branches. I know someone who takes 4,000 photos in a park near me with his Canon R5 and one of their best lenses, I think a 500mm f/2,8 prime, because he's so picky he is happy with only 20% of them. I'm not that picky. I think all of his photos are excellent. But I can take some that he can't because I have ProCap and he has to use a tripod. I'm way more mobile. I have the shot when he's still swinging his camera around and moving around it - too late to take the photo. I'll take the smaller, lighter kit. He can have the birds in the bushes (but I capture them too anyway.)

Click to expand...

My buddy also have been using Canon for years and his wildlife life set up is R5 and 600mm F4. We have been shooting together for years. It is his back issue that got him to start looking at my system. I loaned him my OM1.1 with 200mm F2.8 and 300mm F4. In 2 weeks time, he just bought OM1.2 and 200mm F2.8 and is going to get 150-400mm F4.5 lens soon.

So far he is super happy. I know as soon as he sell his big lens, he will get the big 150--400mm F4.5 lens. He will keep his R5 with his smaller lens for landscape and people.

Click to expand...

Most of my friends that moved to OM System, did so as an "adjunct" to their DSLR kits.............. at first.