Quote:
Originally Posted by dcstep
The thinner your DOF the more you need AF! I routinely shoot super-telephotos at 500mm to 1,000mm (1600mm equivalents) and, even at f/8, DOF is razor then. You can get a bird's eye in focus and the end of its beak will be out of focus. I tried MF and it just doesn't work fast enough.
Steering the AF point or sector is the key to getting the part that you want in focus. Either steer, or focus on the eye and recompose. Those are techniques that any portrait photographer must learn. (Even more true for us wildlife photographers).
Dave
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I couldn't manual focus a twitchy ass bird's little eye in flight if my life depended on it. I'm speaking about portrait photography and static photography of people and animals. Also night photography/Astro photography.
Plenty of times I've missed focus on the eye with my 200 F2 lens if I wasn't close enough to get a focus point on an eye. The focus point covers too large an area to zero in on the eye in those situations, I end up having to dial it in a bit.
You could prob trick a prime lens with autofocus if you changed the in camera lens adjustments to back focus slightly. That way if it focuses on the nose of a dog/coyote/wolf looked directly at you; you end up with the eyes in focus. I would need to calculate where the 200 F2 DOF is compared to the 500 F4 but it can't be any deeper. Great for isolating the subject... Easy to miss the exact target unfortunately. I have plenty of wolf shots with the forehead or nose in focus but the eyes were soft. Autofocus is great if you are close enough to get it entirely on the eye. Not always possible...