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Author Topic: D800 Live view manual focus trick.  (Read 4952 times)

FredBGG

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D800 Live view manual focus trick.
« on: November 20, 2012, 10:44:07 pm »

I just figured out a nifty trick for manual focusing with the D800
using face recognition to assist zooming in on the face for fine focusing.

It's nice when shooting manual focus to be able to zoom in and do fine focus. It's just a bit time consuming to hunt around for the face once you have zoomed in.

Here is how to do it.

(Set the lens to AF/M ,so autofocus is not disabled, buy the lens.)

1 Turn on live view and set it to face recognition AF.
2 Using the switch on the front of the camera turn the AF switch to M

Now the AF is off, but face recognition remains on and chases the face around the frame. Now if you zoom in on the LCD screen to fine focus it will zoom in right on the face where ever the face is. This is really nice if
you are moving the model around a fair bit, changing poses and composition.

The camera will also recognize more than one face and you can toggle between them both zoomed in and not.

This is great for using tilt shift lenses for focusing on more than one model like in the shallow depth shots below:





There are shot on film and I just used them here to help explain the type of shot.

I'm finding this really useful and improves the flow of things on set with tilt shift lenses or any very shallow depth of field work. Great with old legacy lenses. It will be really useful when the new Carl Zeiss lenses will come out.

It also works in video mode for setting up shots before you hit the record button.
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BernardLanguillier

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Re: D800 Live view manual focus trick.
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2012, 11:23:27 pm »

Thanks for reminding me of this option, I had somehow forgotten it could be done.

Cheers,
Bernard

FredBGG

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Re: D800 Live view manual focus trick.
« Reply #2 on: November 21, 2012, 03:04:32 pm »

I discussed focusing and live view focusing with the D800 in more detail here:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=72443.0
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