Depth-of-Field Preview - EOS R

Sir_Peter wrote:

Every experience photographer doesn’t need DOF all the time since they can estimate pretty well what will come out, or assess this at first. And you definitely don’t need DOF preview when shooting at 10 FPS and tracking since you won’t be paying attention to this.

This I cannot agree on. The professional or experienced photographer using a zoomlens cannot be intuitive on the DOF. Sorry but what you are saying is wrong.

Fujifilm got two advantages over the Canon System: They are constantly showing the DOF with shutter half pressed and still work the AF brilliantly. The DOF will be shown in the EVF and display, which is first class with landscape.

Best, Peter

With landscape you aren’t working fast. So in this respect… I simply have a DOF preview button and that takes care of that.

In more dynamic situations DOF only vs wide open shooting is a mixed bag. Since canon actually takes video stopped down (of course) I know they can do stopped down focusing if they wanted to. I wish they would give us that option. For example, in good lighting where AF will be good even with stopped down shooting it would be beneficial (for obvious reasons). This is where you claim of fuji (or Sony for that matter) handling AF brilliantly is correct.

However, I owned Sony systems for years, with the A7III being the last one. And I can correct when I say that you need to keep the performance of hybrid AF systems in mind. Stoped down past f11 even is very bright sunny summer conditions the A7III would switch to CDAF. Which in turn gives you that pogo effect AF experience. Keeping this in mind… any lighting situation that gave the camera the equivalent of that amount of lighting would result in the same experience. So think dim lighting… combination of f-setting and lighting. It was frankly quite annoying to only be able to do continuous AF if I was shooting wide open with an F1.8 lens in some situations, and at times not even that, cause CDAF is just too slow.

So… if I had the choice of having wide open focusing or stopped down focusing, I would chose the former every time. However, as I mentioned I think canon could give us the open to set it. In which case I would use whatever setting makes sense for a given situation.

I simply won’t go back to the situation where with the A7III I didn’t even bother to try and take a picture cause I new CDAF would just frustrate and the moment would be gone anyway. With the canon I can generally approximate my f# settings for the DOF I want since I have that experience over from when I used to shoot DSLRs. A quick press of the DOF button also helps me confirm what I envision if I am in doubt.