Really depends on what I’m shooting and what I want to focus on, but I let the abbreviations be my guide:
AF-S - Autofocus Serendipity AF-C - Autofocus Chance AF-A - Autofocus Anything In the Olympus world, which is where I mostly live, you can set the cameras up to recognise and focus on an eye, with further settings for nearest, furthest and somewhere in between, I guess. If your pentaxes have something like that it would probably with your microphone problem. More recent Olympoi than mine also have a bird recognition capability and focus on the bird’s eye. In general I use AF-S and the lock button as that most closely resembles what I do when I’m shooting with the Leica M. If it’s not doing what i want then I switch to manual. > On 25 Feb 2021, at 03:26, Larry Colen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Just like Arthur Dent and Thursdays, I’ve never really gotten the hang of > autofocus. I think that I’ve pretty much bludgeoned autoexposure into > something resembling submission, but getting my camera to autofocus > correctly, on what I want it to is at best a stochastic exercise. > > On my K100, K20 and K-x I just gave up and installed Katzeye screens and > mostly did manual focus, and because of the way the katzeye worked, that > meant I also ended up doing manual exposure as well. > > Historically, overall, I seem to have had the least bad luck, with it in AF-S > mode, selecting a single point, and using the AF button to lock out the > autofocus once I thought I had it properly focused, Even so, I get a lot of > photos perfectly focused on the microphone in front of a singer, the wrong > portion of a bird, the wall behind dancers, or on absolutely nothing at all > in the frame. > > Lately, I’ve been experimenting with AF-C and AF-A (I’m not sure I understand > what AF-A is), and things don’t usually seem to be much worse. I’ll also > occasionally play with the sel-9 autofocus mode. > > I realize that different types of photography take different techniques. > With static scenes I can fiddle and frotz until I get something that seems to > work, but when photographing birds, either in trees or on the wing, I really > need some techniques and settings that at least improve my odds of getting a > shot in focus. > > What settings do you use in which situations? > > -- > Larry Colen > [email protected] > > > -- > %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
