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Tips og tricks til brug af kameraets (Olympus) autofokusfunktioner

Turning Autofocus from Your Enemy into Your Friend

Here are some suggestions on how to get your autofocus system working for you and not against you:

  • Practice moving your autofocus targets quickly while looking through the viewfinder using a pet, a child or grandchild, a willing spouse, or any object that can move at variable speeds and at different angles. Move the autofocus point(s) as close to the eye of the subject as quickly as possible.
  • Program the L-Fn button on your longer lenses to AF Area Select so that with the press of a button you can quickly change the AF-Target Mode and position. Your support hand on your lens is often over or very close to the L-Fn button to begin with and you don’t have to move your shooting hand or pull the camera away from your face to make these changes. This is important as there is no one AF-Target Mode or location that works all the time.
  • Be sure that Face/Eye Priority is always turned off as this is not the same as bird tracking AF and it will be constantly hunting for a face or eye and this can cause serious issues for wildlife and macro photography.
  • Set the C-AF Tracking Sensitivity to +1 or +2 if you want your autofocus to quickly grab onto a subject. Set the C-AF Tracking Sensitivity to -1 or -2 if you want the autofocus to remain locked onto your subject even when it passes behind another object. In my experience, I prefer to have autofocus be very sensitive (+1 or so it picks up a subject quickly even though I occasionally risk having it grab something else.
  • We have all had a situation where due to low light or low contrast autofocus struggles acquiring the subject. What photographers tend to do is just keep the autofocus button pushed and let the lens scan from close focus too infinity and back again, over and over all the while being frustrated. The C-AF Lens Scanning menu item allows you to control what your lens will do in these situations. There are three modes and my preference is Mode 2 where you lens will scan once through the entire range. The reason I only need it to scan once is I practice focus bumping. There are several ways to employ focus bumping but for this purpose, when autofocus is struggling, it is better too quickly press and release focus multiple times until it acquires focus.
  • Assuming our goal is to get the center focal point, regardless of AF-Target Mode, on the key part of our subject, I set C-AF Starting Focus Point and C-AF Center Target Priority to on for each C-AF Target Mode I use. You do this by checking the box next to each target mode on the respective menus.
  • Olympus recently released the Bird Tracking AF as well and here are some tips for using it to its best. First, understand that no autofocus is perfect and there will be times that it might struggle to acquire a subject. If a bird turns its head away from the camera, the tracking will begin to search for an eye and this might cause it to jump off the subject; however, in my experience this is very limited. Second, understand that bird tracking AF is always working. So, if you are hiking or moving around with it on, it is constantly hunting for a bird and can drain your battery quicker than regular C-AF. To solve this issue, I programmed the Fn Lever so that position one is single target C-AF and position two is 5-target group bird tracking AF. This allows me to switch back and forth quite regularly and preserve battery life when bird tracking AF isn’t necessary. So far, I have had great luck with bird tracking AF with mammals and reptiles.

Following these few steps should take your autofocus system and skill to the next level in your photography. There are always small tweaks we can make to our settings to get it just how you like it and to a place where what we have works best for us.