With groups of animals on N Z8, what’s the best AF to use

[lynniepooh]

Reading the Wildlife book over and over gives me more insight every time, but most on AF and AF + SD pertains to one animal and 1 eyeball. What is the best approach to a group of Bengali tigers? Mommy and babies?
Ever so appreciative,
Lynn

 

[DRwyoming]

Reading the Wildlife book over and over gives me more insight every time, but most on AF and AF + SD pertains to one animal and 1 eyeball. What is the best approach to a group of Bengali tigers? Mommy and babies?
Ever so appreciative,
Lynn

For groups of mammals I tend to use a moderately sized to smaller AF Area mode like Wide-Small or a very small C1/C2 custom area to make sure I've got the eye(s) of the most important subject in good focus and then have the aperture dialed down enough for sufficient Depth of Field (DoF) to keep the other subject's eye(s) in focus.

Basically there's no AF Area mode that can force the camera to focus at different distances, the lens can only focus to one distance optically. If all of your subject's eyes are at different distances, you have to rely on aperture and DoF for that. The best you can do is make sure either the most important subject or the subject at the average distance is in sharp focus and then stop the lens down via the aperture control to increase the DoF as necessary. Often repositioning myself so the multiple subjects are more parallel to my position can help as it puts the various subjects closer to the same focus distance but that's not always an option.

If it's not possible to stop down far enough to keep all subjects in crisp focus and your subjects are relatively still you can try a quick focus stack where you focus on the eyes of one and then another and merge the two photos in post processing to retain the sharpest parts of each. I've done that for owls roosting on different branches such that one was a foot or two closer to me than the other and no amount of stopping down my 600mm lens would keep both in sharp focus. It worked largely because roosting owls are so still that they didn't move between shots as I focused on the eyes of one and then the eyes of the other. I used Single Point AF area mode in that case so I could focus exactly on one owl's eye and then the other owl to make sure both were crisp. It might work with some stationary mammals or other slow moving subjects but doesn't generally work for fast action shots where there's too much subject motion between the two shots.

 

[Cameron T]

Yep. You can only focus in one place at once. I'm pretty sure Steve has a video about depth of field somewhere though.

 

[JAJohnson]

Reading the Wildlife book over and over gives me more insight every time, but most on AF and AF + SD pertains to one animal and 1 eyeball. What is the best approach to a group of Bengali tigers? Mommy and babies?
Ever so appreciative,
Lynn

Steve’s techniques for keeping more than one animal in focus: See the video below from 15:14 to 17:45…

…and a more complete description here.

Hope this is helpful.

 

[lynniepooh]

Thanks all

 

[thelordofthelight]

I photograph wild tigers frequently and here is what i do:

1. Turn off subject detection as it simply doesn’t work on tigers, unless you are taking a tight portrait of the face or a close-up head-on shot
2. Although I have 4-5 AF modes configured to different buttons, my most used AF mode is Wide-S. I have configured Wide-S (AF-On+AF Area) to the lens fn button and the reason is - The lens fn button is placed in a way that my left hand thumb or middle finger can reach easily at my natural holding position of the tele lens. This way, I can use my right thumb to freely move the joy stick and move the Wide-S box anywhere in the screen, very handy even when the subject is on the move

As to depth of field, it’s really tricky unless the tigers are too close to each other, stopping down isn’t of much use. You can either focus on multiple tigers and take separate shots and stack in post or change the shooting angle, instead of eye level, shoot at an angle to keep multiple animals sharp. Problem with the latter approach is you will not have a pleasing foreground to background transition. If you are able to move your safari vehicle freely, which is quite rare in tiger parks, you can also consider moving a little away to get more depth naturally and consider environmental shots. With higher MP bodies, you can also crop in a bit to get tighter frames with multiple animals in focus.

 

[lynniepooh]

Thanks so much. Very helpful