Situations That seem to challenge the amazing AF systems of the R6 and R6

[Aussie shooter]

Wow! Great work with the manual focus. These images are really interesting, I couldn’t even see the hare at first and thought it was just a photo of dry grass

Thanks mate. I have been chasing these shots for a while and actually just got lucky with these ones as i was leaving at the time and saw this fella. Shot these out of the car window and the hare was obliging enough for me to be able to zoom in to achieve manual focus.

It would take a higher form of artificial intelligence to sort those out. Did using just the centre point fail? I have just posted a couple of shots in the Bird Portrait thread illustrating how the eyeAF can find the head of tiny distant birds.

Centre point failed as well. Even when the eye was visible. But I am not suggesting it is a flaw of the system. it is just about as difficult a situation as one could come up against. But the ability to zoom in to 10x magnification while manual focusing helped

 

[Sporgon]

But the ability to zoom in to 10x magnification while manual focusing helped

With the advent of EVFs there's been a lot of talk about the wonders of focus peaking, but I've found the only sure way of critical focus is still greater magnification.

 

[koenkooi]

With the advent of EVFs there's been a lot of talk about the wonders of focus peaking, but I've found the only sure way of critical focus is still greater magnification.

Especially with insect macro, the peaking algo is convinced everything is in focus. I greatly appreciate the wonders of 10x and higher magnification in the EVF for that.

 

[Nemorino]

Of cause magnification is the best choice to keep one subject in focus. But focus peaking is great to get two in the plane of focus.

Focus peaking is also very useful to adjust angle of a tilt lens.

 

[Aussie shooter]

Going back to my initial point about the AF being unable to locate a zebras eye. It goes further than that. It jumps all over the place with them. It simply cannot pick a spot and stick. I wish I could record it and show you. Quite amazing considering how good it is with almost anything else. nature is amazing

 

[docsmith]

Hopefully the Zebra eye phenomena is a firmware fix at some point down the road. As you mention, it really is remarkable. This juvenile hawk was taken through a lot of brush. The blue box was bouncing off the eye to body, to the brush. But when I got home, I only had to throw out maybe 4-5 shots for being OOF. Nothing I'll put on my wall. But, still, the Eye-AF is impressive.

 

[YuengLinger]

This is another situation where the R6 AF system just could not cope( I doubt ANY AF system would work here). I had to resort to manual focus to get these shots as there was just too much grass waving around in front of the Hare

Funny, just yesterday couldn't AF on cardinal walking in much shorter grass exactly this color. Bird was not obscured at all. Seemed like the colors were throwing off AF.

 

[stevelee]

Zebras have stripes so that they won’t be spotted.

 

[Aussie shooter]

Zebras have stripes so that they won’t be spotted.

That hurt my soul

 

[JPAZ]

Over the weekend tried some waterfowl pics on R5. The light was not great and he iso was 2000 and up. I was using an adapted EF 100-400 mkii with 1.4x mkiii. Some challenges but when I used "2 button" back button focus (as documented in multiple sites - one button is AF and second button is eye AF), got a lot of accurate focusing. The photos? Many are really marginal because 560mm equivalent in that setting needed cropping but when I checked the focus, most were spot on even with that lens and adapter combo. I am going to return to that location in the future with an adapted EF 300 f/2.8 and 2x mkiii and give it another try.

Always learning......

 

[stevelee]

That hurt my soul

I had just happened to see that somewhere recently, so I couldn’t resist passing it along.

 

[Bdbtoys]

I once did a test shot of a notepad document (with just A's on word wrap) on my monitor... zoomed in so it was the only thing visible (no monitor edges to go off of) and it hunted like no tomorrow (would go OoF on wide, past 'in focus', then OoF on zoom, then repeat). I was further than min focusing distance away (so that wasn't it). I attribute it to many factors, most of which it being a light source, distance, ambient lighting, the refresh rate of the monitor, and the camera settings. It was something I normally don't have an issue with, but was able to create (and duplicate) a perfect storm of settings where I could trigger it on demand.