Friday, January 24, 2014

AF Dynamic Area Tests

When I first got my D4 I was super jazzed to have the top of the line Nikon camera and thought it would solve my focus struggles straight away.

I learned that's not the case, that focus is hard for things like flying birds, etc.  To help learn how the D4 focus system works I ran some tests w/ dynamic area enabled.   What I found was that the focus was jumping all over the place, some times even selecting focus points where there was no subject.

This can be hard to see in real time, and hard to track once you get home.  But using ViewNX (free from Nikon) you can enable focus points during image review. 

Here are a few gifs that show sequences of attempting to track an osprey in flight.  The images are zoomed in to the same magnification and the images are not moved within the application, so the center of the frame should be the center of the frame through out the gif's images...

Put your mouse over a focus point and watch it jump around during the series of images...