My (seemingly) never ending Focus woes ... BIF advice needed

[jp121]

Re: My never ending Focus woes with my 5DMK3

Hobby Shooter,

try 'back button auto focus' for the golfer. It saves switching to manual every time. Back button AF takes AF away from the shutter button. You can hit the shutter button all day with no AF. To re-AF press the 'back button'.

 

[bjd]

Re: My (seemingly) never ending Focus woes.... BIF advice needed

Hi,
I have much more of a grip on how thinks should work and in many cases I do get them to work that way.
Tracking small Birds and getting them in focus is still not what I had hoped for so I am systematically trying to work through that now. That in itself is difficult, how should one do anything systematically with the little critters?
So, much of this has been said before, but I would like to discuss the points according to my experience at this time. Please bear with me :-\

So, I tried a setup where the birds can only fly across the FOV left to right to land on a feeding spot. And back out the same way. Using a Zoom is almost impossible here as the birds spend too little time in the field of view, plus DOF is in most cases just too shallow. So I'm currently trying with my 16-35.

I'm also planning a setup where the birds will fly more into the Camera instead of across it at 90°.

In the above case its impossible to put a focus point on the bird manually, I'm too slow for it. So I guessed that using 61-Point auto-selection is the way to go. I cant use AI Focus as I cant focus beforehand on a still subject, AI Servo requires a manually selected AF point beforehand too. So So IMHO it looks like one way is to use AI Servo and a single point pushed over to the left and hope that that achieves focus straight away.

Now to the background, I have trouble that the camera likes to focus on the background. I tried various sheets, but they provided a perfect target and the camera took them everytime. Apart from a proper backdrop, any tips here to provide something the camera wont focus on?

Comments?

Cheers Brian