Tip of the month: December 2022. Human/Animal Detect Autofocus
Almost every day (in my role at Ted’s Cameras) I meet someone who has a DSLR camera, and is wrestling with a difficult decision we all come to at some time. Do I upgrade to a newer/better DSLR, or do I make the big jump to a mirrorless camera?
Just like many old-school film photographers were suspicious of digital cameras at first, many people now just aren’t sure about the new mirrorless development, even though it’s been going for quite a few years now. There are some definite advantages to mirrorless, but in this tip I want to talk about just one: Human/Animal Detect AF.
With a DSLR camera, you can usually choose a couple of different Autofocus (AF) area mode options. Many cameras offer single point, multi-point zone, and ‘all-over’ focus, where the camera can use all the focus points available to decide what to focus on. For portraits and wildlife, you would usually choose single point, and you had to make sure your focus point was trained on the subject – and if possible on the eyes of the subject. For moving subjects, you might choose a cluster of focus points to make it easier to keep the AF trained on the person or animal. But this became more difficult if the subject was moving erratically, and not in a straight path.
Mirrorless cameras bring us something totally new – Face/Eye Detection AF. Now your camera can find a person wherever they are in the frame. You don’t have to train a single focus point on the subject. Just switch to eye-detect and the camera will find them wherever they are in the shot. From a distance, it will find a human shape. As they come closer, it will lock onto a face. And when close enough, it will focus directly on an eye – usually the eye nearest to the camera. And it works whether your subject is standing still, or in motion as with the portrait photo above, where I caught my model laughing as she tripped and fell forward towards me.
Now many brands have taken this a step further with an animal detection AF feature. Some even go so far as to recognize birds specifically. We even have some cameras with car and motorbike detection. And the amazing part is that these subject detection AF features can find and lock onto a subject even when there is plenty of distraction in the surroundings, as with my lion shot below.
YOU CAN WATCH ME COMING TO TERMS WITH HUMAN/ANIMAL AF ON MY LUMIX G9 HERE
So if you have been looking for a reason to take a closer look at mirrorless cameras, maybe this is the one!
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