Car Autotracking Question

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Nimi

Nimi

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Recently on assignment shot a moving car with the Z9 and several native lenses. I used auto tracking but noticed that in many of the shots the focus landed on the middle of the car, not the headlight which made some photos unusable. Any idea how it's supposed to track and whether there is a way to modify it? Otherwise, absolutely great performance and the client is very happy.
 
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Nimi said:
Recently on assignment shot a moving car with the Z9 and several native lenses. I used auto tracking but noticed that in many of the shots the focus landed on the middle of the car, not the headlight which made some photos unusable. Any idea how it's supposed to track and whether there is a way to modify it? Otherwise, absolutely great performance and the client is very happy.
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It seems car "eye af" is in order. this is tricky, probably need to convince Nikon to throw us an option to focus on the headlights otherwise it is working "as intended".

Workaround - set depth of field to be bigger ?
 
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A Nikon Rep stated what feels like a long time ago that when shooting cars then Subject Detection autofocus would "try" to land in the middle of the bonnet to allow shooters to bring the driver and front of the car in focus -- clearly one should shoot with an aperture that allows sufficient DOF for the front of the vehicle to be in reasonable focus.
 
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Joel N said:
It seems car "eye af" is in order. this is tricky, probably need to convince Nikon to throw us an option to focus on the headlights otherwise it is working "as intended".

Workaround - set depth of field to be bigger ?
Click to expand...
My work around was to turn recognition off and simply track the lights with a point or wide area. And 100% agree, need option to have "headlight" to be treated as "eye." I needed a shallow depth of field for editorial reasons.
 
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ajm057 said:
A Nikon Rep stated what feels like a long time ago that when shooting cars then Subject Detection autofocus would "try" to land in the middle of the bonnet to allow shooters to bring the driver and front of the car in focus -- clearly one should shoot with an aperture that allows sufficient DOF for the front of the vehicle to be in reasonable focus.
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That's what was inconsistent. Sometime it did, sometime it grabbed the door 1.5 m away from the center of the grill. And somehow, it nailed all rear-quarter shots, focusing on the closest rear corner when the car was angled and centered when it was relatively flat.

It actually worked remarkably well. On closer shots I had the auto select and it went for the driver, as intended, it acquired when the car was a speck and wouldn't let go, etc.

On the afternoon session the weather changed and I had to shoot wide open. That's when I turned the detection off and got a slightly better yield.

Going back in two weeks to shoot the video and I'll play around some more.
 
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Nimi said:
It actually worked remarkably well. On closer shots I had the auto select and it went for the driver, as intended, it acquired when the car was a speck and wouldn't let go, etc.
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Yup that's my experience with auto subject detection as well, the priority from car then driver when near is really good. Nikon got this right at least :)
 
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