About a week ago we went to the Dickens Christmas Fair at the Cow Palace (Daly City, very close to Brisbane). In theory, the 35/1.4 would be an ideal lens for photographing dancing in crowded, low-light conditions. I seem to keep running into the opposite of the vocalists microphone problem. Rather than focusing on some random object in the foreground, I keep getting all of these photos that are perfectly focused on the wall, 10, 20 or 30 feet behind the people that I’m trying to photograph. My guess is that it is not a problem with the lens, but with geometry. The wider angle lens has so much more background in the frame, the camera has more opportunities to focus on the sharp edge in the background.
The last time I ran into this I was using my standard select-1 autofocus mode, this time I tried using select-9 in the hopes that it would select the object in the foreground. It didn’t work. I don’t know if it would work better using AF-C rather than AF-S, if it has a different algorithm to select the moving object in the foreground. I do wish that just like there are different auto exposure modes, there were different auto-focus modes, i.e. select the the object a little further back so that you get the vocalist rather than the mic, select the object closer so that you get the person rather than the wall behind them, or only try to focus on objects near infinity so that when you’re trying to photograph a bird it doesn’t rack the autofocus all of the way to the closest and back out while the bird flies out of the frame. I did try checking out my previews, but on such a small screen, everything looked like it was in focus. Another feature I would love would be similar to the blinkies that show clipping, have the focus peaking edge detection active on preview so I can easily see in the preview what the camera focused on. In any case, Dickens Fair can be a fun outing, and does provide some fun photographic opportunities (even if they don’t allow you to take photos at the naughty French Postcards show), and I do recommend it for folks in the Bay Area between Thanksgiving and Christmas. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/albums/72157712035774796 -- Larry Colen [email protected] -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
