Simon Barker wrote:
You would be better off getting a copy of the lens and seeing the fault for yourself than trying to argue that shooting a child is not an appropriate use of Eye AF.
Simon, I am not arguing that shooting a child is not an appropriate use of EyeAF, but I am arguing you probably shouldn't use EyeAF to shoot a child wearing a shirt with a lot of eyes on it if you don't want the AF to focus on the shirt. They probably shouldn't be holding a box with a lot of eyes on it either if you don't want the EyeAF to focus on the box. Come on. I am pointing out what is a reasonable problem with EyeAF. It can't always tell what eyes you want to focus on and if there are lots of eyes it may choose, you may not get focus where you want it.
Nov 16, 2018 at 04:02 PM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
zeitlos wrote:
I also appreciate your comment. I really do. However, I'm not sure whether your comment was meant satirical in parts or not.
I don't really know where to start. But still, okay, let me ask you a simple question: fokus indicators were always (sometimes jumping form eyes to eyebrows) sticking to the eyes of the model. Of course. So just for me to understand: You say that even if the camera confirms it's there, it's "miles" away and somewhere else in the frame If true it would make things even worse.
Btw. believe me, my wife doesn't wear Disney shirts, still it was 50% off. That's why I did this next testing with the kid.
I don't see any common sense in what you wrote. I would, if you told me that even though the camera indicates that focus is on the eyes of the model it's somewhere off. Please give me a technical proof for your claim and I believe in what you said. I'm not talking about front focus but about the camera focussing on other parts of the picture even though it continuously confirms that it's log in on the eye of the model.
Obviously I don't know where the focus indicator box was, but it is easy to tell where the camera focussed in these shots, at least when the motion blur is not so bad. All I am really saying is that for this particular subject matter when there are lots of eyes to focus on for many of the shots it really doesn't make sense to use EyeAF. AF is never magic and EyeAF works best when there are a relatively small number of eyes to focus on. I think that is pretty straightforward.
You sound apologetic to me. Lots of people have popped up saying the same thing shooting in lots of different situations. My Batis 85 or Sony 55 1.8 always did the job.
zeitlos wrote:
I also appreciate your comment. I really do. However, I'm not sure whether your comment was meant satirical in parts or not.
I don't really know where to start. But still, okay, let me ask you a simple question: fokus indicators were always (sometimes jumping form eyes to eyebrows) sticking to the eyes of the model. Of course. So just for me to understand: You say that even if the camera confirms it's there, it's "miles" away and somewhere else in the frame If true it would make things even worse.
Btw. believe me, my wife doesn't wear Disney shirts, still it was 50% off. That's why I did this next testing with the kid.
I don't see any common sense in what you wrote. I would, if you told me that even though the camera indicates that focus is on the eyes of the model it's somewhere off. Please give me a technical proof for your claim and I believe in what you said. I'm not talking about front focus but about the camera focussing on other parts of the picture even though it continuously confirms that it's log in on the eye of the model.
Have you sent the images to Zeiss? A copy of the email I received from Zeiss is below.
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"Thanks for your inquiry.
In the last days, a few photographers, who already use the Batis 2/40 CF, reported that the eye-AF function doesn’t always lead to a perfectly focused image. As we take the feedback from our customers very seriously, we are intensively evaluating the issue to reproduce this reported effect. If you can provide a few sample images that show this effect, please support us in the evaluation by sending us information in which situations (lighting conditions, camera model, camera settings…) this might appear.
Please understand that it takes some time to evaluate if the reported issues are related to the conditions, to individual combinations of camera, lens and menu settings, to individual copies of the Batis 2/40 CF, or in general to the lenses of this type.
You may rest assured that we do our best to evaluate and solve any kind of issues that might appear in combination with our photo lenses."
zeitlos wrote:
You sound apologetic to me. Lots of people have pop up saying the same thing shooting in lots of different situation. My Batis 85 or Sony 55 1.8 always did the job.
And as I said, it doesn't matter what kind of T-shirt the person is wearing. It's mostly off.
Have never experienced such a things as with the Batis 40mm. Never. But if you want to believe it's me lacking common sense, it's fine with me.
Well, I am not being apologetic, and I stand by my assessment that if you choose to use EyeAF when there are lots of eyes it may focus on that you don't want the system to focus on that doesn't make a lot of sense. I have been on this forum for about eight years. I am not an apologist for any brand. People who have been around here know that. I have seen lots of equipment come and go and a number of examples of equipment that has been introduced that was less than perfect. I think that is certainly true of this Basis 40mm lens, but at the same time I can differentiate between strong evidence for a problem and very weak evidence of the problem and whether you like it or not the pictures you posted do not provide strong evidence of the problem because you are using EyeAF in a situation in which it really does not make sense to use it.
Nov 16, 2018 at 04:15 PM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
Steve Spencer wrote:
So, are you saying that the pictures as you posted them are useless to our evaluation of the lens?
Maybe it's because English isn't my mother tongue that you don't get what I'm trying to convey.
So let me try it again and for the last time:
What I meant was that it doesn't matter if you know where the focus indicator box was. It's important that I know it. If I posted pictures I took with the focus indicator box not on the child's eyes wanting them to be sharp, what kind of proof/test (call it whatever you want) would this be?
So I don't understand what you want to imply. You still haven't answered my question. Maybe you can't because you don't have the knowledge which is perfectly fine. Then I would be glad to hear from someone else if it is plausible that the focus indicator box is glued to the child's eyes but logs in onto something different in the picture without indicating it.
Edit: One more question. What's the refined explanation for the eye-af jumping form eyeball to eyebrow quite frequently (with people who are old enough to do without Disney shirts)? And why is no other lens (Batis 85 etc.) behaving like this?
Steve Spencer wrote:
Simon, I am not arguing that shooting a child is not an appropriate use of EyeAF, but I am arguing you probably shouldn't use EyeAF to shoot a child wearing a shirt with a lot of eyes on it if you don't want the AF to focus on the shirt. They probably shouldn't be holding a box with a lot of eyes on it either if you don't want the EyeAF to focus on the box. Come on. I am pointing out what is a reasonable problem with EyeAF. It can't always tell what eyes you want to focus on and if there are lots of eyes it may choose, you may not get focus where you want it....Show more →
I can't see how you logically come to that conclusion, you say it's a reasonable problem with Eye AF but this is not highlighting an issue with Eye AF. Even though there are several eyes in shot it was a fairly undemanding subject that shouldn't have posed any real problem for Eye AF, it looks exactly like the results I've experienced on subjects who didn't have any characters on their shirts and you make the assumption the photographer failed to notice where focus was confirmed.
Even if you were correct on that one subject it still does not explain every other shot having the same problem, I can grab another lens turn on Eye AF and nail moving subjects with ease but this Batis can't manage static subjects in ideal conditions and as I have to keep pointing out this issue goes beyond Eye AF, it is not just a combination of Eye AF and this lens.
My earlier point was you can go through a lot of mental gymnastics to explain away almost anything, if you get a copy of the lens you can show us what we've been doing wrong and put the issue to bed but I'm almost entirely certain you'll see exactly the same behaviour we've described.
Regardless, my copy is being collected on Wednesday, I'll be sorry to see it go but I can't accept spending four figures on a faulty product unless Zeiss guarantees a fix; at the very least they should have been professional enough to bother responding to my emails or answer their phone (did I mention I spent 2 hours waiting and no one bothered to answer? ).
To see how insubstantial the claims made are you just have to look at the second picture where there even are no comic characters/other eyes in sight. Next check where it's sharp... Not the eyes, not the character's eyes... "lovely" front focus.
Nov 16, 2018 at 05:02 PM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
zeitlos wrote:
Maybe it's because English isn't my mother tongue that you don't get what I'm trying to convey.
So let me try it again and for the last time:
What I meant was that it doesn't matter if you know where the focus indicator box was. It's important that I know it. If I posted pictures I took with the focus indicator box not on the child's eyes wanting them to be sharp, what kind of proof/test (call it whatever you want) would this be?
So I don't understand what you want to imply. You still haven't answered my question. Maybe you can't because you don't have the knowledge which is perfectly fine. Then I would be glad to hear from someone else if it is plausible that the focus indicator box is glued to the child's eyes but logs in onto something different in the picture without indicating it.
Edit: One more question. What's the refined explanation for the eye-af jumping form eyeball to eyebrow quite frequently (with people who are old enough to do without Disney shirts)? And why is no other lens (Batis 85 etc.) behaving like this?
If in all these shots the AF indicator was on the child's eye, then you lens is highly defective and not in the way that other people have described here. The actual focus point is often very far from the child's eye. The evidence in the photos themselves do not show this, however, and they show the use of EyeAF in a situation when it does not make sense to use it. They also show the use of a shutter speed that is generally too slow for this type of shooting. Sorry, I don't want to be overly critical and we all make mistakes from time to time and shoot with too slow a shutter speed, but those shots are not the ones that should be posted to evaluate a lens. You may not know this but there is also software that will let you display the AF box. That would be very helpful in evaluating any shots for the claim the AF box is indicating the focus point wrong. If the AF box is always on the eyes in these shots, then what seems to be the problem is that the AF indicator box is not working properly, but there in the big majority of these shots where the focus plane can be determined despite the motion blur the EyeAF is focussing on an eye (or a similar oval object) it just it often isn't the one you intended.
Nov 16, 2018 at 05:04 PM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
zeitlos wrote:
To see how insubstantial the claims made are you just have to look at the second picture where there even are no comic characters/other eyes in sight. Next check where it's sharp... Not the eyes, not the character's eyes... "lovely" front focus.
Actually focus is fairly hard to tell in that picture as there is obvious motion blur. That one does seem to front focus, but again if you are going to evaluate a lens hand held you really should be shooting it at a shutter speed that prevents motion blur. Let's distinguish between strong evidence and weak evidence. These pictures are at best weak evidence as they are not shot in a way that allows proper evaluation of the lens. If you hang around this forum for longer than two weeks you will see there are lots of tests of lenses and there is an expectation that when people present pictures to evaluate a lens they will get the basics right or at least acknowledge that they didn't get the basic right and that makes it a lot harder to draw inferences from the pictures. These shots did not get the basic right neither in shutter speed nor in the color space that was used to post the images. There is a bit higher standard around here for tests and if you are going to post and hang around here you should get to know what those standards are. I'm not saying people can't post pictures taken in less than perfect conditions or with less than perfect technique. It is just when they do, they need to acknowledge that if they want us to use those pictures to evaluate a lens.
Steve Spencer wrote:
You may not know this but there is also software that will let you display the AF box. That would be very helpful in evaluating any shots for the claim the AF box is indicating the focus point wrong. If the AF box is always on the eyes in these shots, then what seems to be the problem is that the AF indicator box is not working properly, but there in the big majority of these shots where the focus plane can be determined despite the motion blur the EyeAF is focussing on an eye (or a similar oval object) it just it often isn't the one you intended....Show more →
First: I know that there is/was software to see display the AF box. Apple aperture was able to do so. Which one (for Mac) can do it today?
Second: What do you mean when you say "AF indicator box is not working properly". Seems complicated again. It's working perfectly (as I've stated multiple times) with all my lenses. So is it the lens or the camera responsible for a properly working AF indicator box?
Third: How can you talk about motion blur if the nose quite often is sharp?
Well, as I said. I leave it there. The only thing I'm interested in is which software can show where the focus box was at the time a picture was taken?
Nov 16, 2018 at 05:12 PM
Steve Spencer Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: On
zeitlos wrote:
First: I know that there is/was software to see display the AF box. Apple aperture was able to do so. Which one (for Mac) can do it today?
Second: What do you mean when you say "AF indicator box is not working properly". Seems complicated again. It's working perfectly (as I've stated multiple times) with all my lenses. So is it the lens or the camera responsible for a properly working AF indicator box?
Third: How can you talk about motion blur if the nose quite often is sharp?
Well, as I said. I leave it there. The only thing I'm interested in is which software can show where the focus box was at the time a picture was taken?...Show more →
zeitlos wrote:
First: I know that there is/was software to see display the AF box. Apple aperture was able to do so. Which one (for Mac) can do it today?
Second: What do you mean when you say "AF indicator box is not working properly". Seems complicated again. It's working perfectly (as I've stated multiple times) with all my lenses. So is it the lens or the camera responsible for a properly working AF indicator box?
Third: How can you talk about motion blur if the nose quite often is sharp?
Well, as I said. I leave it there. The only thing I'm interested in is which software can show where the focus box was at the time a picture was taken?...Show more →
#1 see my last post.
#2 What I mean by that is the AF indicator box is not indicating where the focus actually occurs.
#3 You need to think more about motion blur in your shots and examine them a bit more closely. There are a number of those shots in which the nose is not sharp because of motion blur. Despite that no one part of the photo (including noses) is the indicator of motion blur. If the child is holding their nose steady but blinking or crinkling their eyes in a smile and the shutter speed is too slow the nose will be sharp but the eyes will be blurry because of motion blur (this assumes depth of field covers both). So to prevent motion blur you need to keep your shutter speeds up and if you don't know, image stabilization does not help at all with motion blur. Likewise high resolution digital files require faster shutter speeds than film used to require to prevent motion blur, but there aren't any hard and fast rules. Different subjects require different shutter speeds (birds in flight for example often need 1/1000), but in my experience anything less than 1/100 for kids is too slow (and your shots seem consistent with my experience as they show motion blur) and I prefer a considerably faster shutter speed and will often sacrifice ISO (cranking it up a bit) to get it.
As I understood it, if you look at your picture after shooting it and press the zoom in button on your Sony A7iii it automatically zooms in where you set the focus.
zeitlos wrote:
As I understood it, if you look at your picture after shooting it and press the zoom in button on your Sony A7iii it automatically zooms in where you set the focus.
If true it would make things even worse.
).