Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Mirrorless Cameras => Topic started by: FrankG on March 29, 2018, 11:54:13 am
-
A7R3 55mm/1.8 + a soon to be added Batis 85/1.8
Portraits - candid, environmental, or studio:
I am improving my hit rate but still have a way to go with all Sony’s focus permutations.
Focus Area, Face priority, Eye AF - which selections to make, when & why ?
Eye AF appears to be a ‘one size fits all’ solution if there’s a frontal face in the frame.
Regardless of which Focus area is selected (wide, zone, spot…), it finds an eye and sticks on it.
But it doesn’t work if the person looks down (eyelids) or is partially obscured (glasses), or in profile.
For these instances, the Focus area Flexible Spot:M or S would allow me to manually move the point to the eye. I can use the joystick or the touch screen.
When Face Priority is on, it seems to take priority over the Eye AF, and won’t necessarily focus on the eyes. It may be the nose, mouth, forehead or hair, no telling. At a mid-range aperture. or in a wider shot, this probably wont matter, but in a close shot or with a wide open aperture it could matter.
Then there’s the option of Lock-on AF: (Center, Wide, Zone, Flexible Spot S,M,L, Expand flexible spot). This tracks the focus point. With Face Priority on and In Lock-on AF: Flexible Spot I think the camera still chooses the face over the flexible spot.
How do you have it setup for candid, environmental, or studio portraits?
-
EyeAF can be assigned to a button and will still work when Face detection is off... so use your fav non FD mode and press EyeAF button when you see that eye can be found ... $0.02
-
thanks
-
thanks
you shall know that with face detected Sony will meter the face (consider it a variation of a spot metering where the detected face is a big spot) like ~2.7 EV below clipping in raw (green channel) for skin tones - and that works also with TTL flash - so you can somewhat reliably use TTL flash setup w/o extra metering (if so you want)... that is if TTL is implemented w/o bugs (Godox / Flashpoint TTL transmitters for Sony for example have a bug affecting apertures wider than F3.5-4.0)
-
Look at Mark Galer's videos. He has an excellent one for portraits. I use it whenever I'm photographing people, superb results. His landscape settings are also excellent. I do sometimes change things a bit but overall, he's authoritative.
-
Thanks