Back Button Focus with or without Half Press enabled? Quad Focus?

When I first set up my R5, I followed Jan Wegner's excellent video (https://youtu.be/-nnRqgXu7QI?t=456). Like other back button focus videos, he said to disable the half-press focusing by the shutter button.

But then I posted about Jan leaving out that it was possible to have a "triple back button focus, and VisuallyOriented commented that it was not necessary to disable the shutter button (thread here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66946971

It got me thinking about why all the back button videos say to disable the shutter button. If you keep the back button pressed while shooting, it will dictate the focus. The only advantage I could think of was to support "focus and recompose," but then you could do that with the half-press.

Usually, when I use back button focus, I start holding the button to lock the focus (and pre-check how the focus will work) and then hit the shutter when I want to start shooting. Keeping the back button held down will override the half press (as I understand it and tried it with the camera).

Combined in the sub-menus when setting up the AF-On and * buttons plus using the AF-Point-Select button (to the right of the *) for eye detection, this would seem to give 4 simultaneously available focus modes.

Am I missing something? Is there a reference article or video that you can point at?

Karl

chipman wrote:

For me, separating the focus from the shutter button was for those times I don't want the camera to focus.

Ex. - shooting a deer walking across the side of a hill. I get focus while the deer is in the open. When the deer walks behind some trees I want the focus to stay on the deer, not switch to the tree branch that's 5 feet closer. With the focus off the shutter button I can keep on shooting, and not have to wait for the deer to reach the next open spot. […]

This is why I want the ‘detect only’ AF option from the video side be available for stills as well. That will avoid (re)focusing on the back- or foreground when the subject gets occluded.

Karl_Guttag wrote:

When I first set up my R5, I followed Jan Wegner's excellent video (https://youtu.be/-nnRqgXu7QI?t=456). Like other back button focus videos, he said to disable the half-press focusing by the shutter button.

But then I posted about Jan leaving out that it was possible to have a "triple back button focus, and VisuallyOriented commented that it was not necessary to disable the shutter button (thread here: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66946971

It got me thinking about why all the back button videos say to disable the shutter button. If you keep the back button pressed while shooting, it will dictate the focus. The only advantage I could think of was to support "focus and recompose," but then you could do that with the half-press.

Usually, when I use back button focus, I start holding the button to lock the focus (and pre-check how the focus will work) and then hit the shutter when I want to start shooting. Keeping the back button held down will override the half press (as I understand it and tried it with the camera).

Combined in the sub-menus when setting up the AF-On and * buttons plus using the AF-Point-Select button (to the right of the *) for eye detection, this would seem to give 4 simultaneously available focus modes.

Am I missing something? Is there a reference article or video that you can point at?

Karl

As some others have noted, the "focus and recompose" is pretty much lost. Something else I noticed is that if I set the main (red menu) AF focus to "One-Shot" to focus and recompose with the shutter button, then the "eye detection" button also becomes one-shot locking and won't track the eye (the other buttons follow their INFO sub-menu setting).

At least for now, I have left the camera in Servo AF and disabled half-press focusing. I like having 3 back button focus methods, Spot (actually default = "-", so I can change it quickly), Face/Object tracking, and Eye.