Eye focusNo matter what, the eye has to be in focus. But what is one to do when other objects are between you and the animal's eye? When we look at a final image, the image seems easy to capture. The reason for this is that the foliage between you and your subject is blurred. So we cannot see the extent of the interference or the real size of the leaves. Just trust me, getting focus on the eye, when obscured by other things, can be very difficult. Camera autofocus systems used to grab on to whatever was closest to you. Then these systems got better as you can maneuver a box over the eye you want in focus for the camera to know where to focus at.
Today's modern cameras will automatically recognize the subject's eye and focus on it. These systems work brilliantly, generally speaking. There are situations though, like this one, where the wind is swaying those out of focus leaves back and forth. Those leave end up right in front of the Lion's eye. This can trick the camera's autofocus system and leave you frustrated at best, missing the shot at worst. So how do we solve that problem? The best solution is to use what Nikon's users often refer to as the hand-off technique. We use a wide area box to tell the camera to only focus on what is found in the box. When focus has been generally acquired (on the Lion versus on the moving leaves), then we would hand focus off to the eye tracking to take over. The problem is when the focus is on the leaves the Lion's face is so blurred that the camera cannot discern the eye. By using the box the get the focus in the ball park we get the Lion's face reasonably in focus which allows the camera to now make out the eye. It is best to program two autofocus modes on two different buttons. I use the two front buttons, next to the lens. This means that I can switch focus modes in a split second. Thus using two different focusing modes solves the problem and gives us what we want, sharply focused eyes. Comments
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