Do you turn off eye detection when shooting football? Do the helmets confuse the camera? I will be using the A1 body. Are there any other optimal settings for taking football during the day?
@Banzai75x perhaps the A1 is different, I never used one, but the A7R V doesn't have a setting to turn off eye detection. There's a more generic setting called "subject recognition" and it grabs eyes if it sees it, or entire bodies if an eye cannot be detected. Or... perhaps I missed something!
Anyway... with my limited experience shooting fast action, I simply used tracking with focus hold and a small focus area. Perhaps I'm not taking advantage of the high-tech capabilities of my camera, but I just find it so easy: "snatch" a target with a center focus point and then hold it with the button on the lens as you're tracking and recomposing. When I tried subject recognition, I found myself thinking more: instructing the camera which auto-recognized body to track somehow feels harder than just manually placing a rectange on one.
My TODO for the future is to experiment with subject recognition combined with a very small focus area, to avoid it recognizing multiple subjects. But I suspect that the overall usability and effectiveness of this approach will not be higher than my simple tracking method. Will see...
Helmets are usually not an issue so long as you can see the face. Visors, sunglasses or goggles that hide the eyes or cover too much of the face will force the camera to fall back to face or body detection. You can leave face/eye priority on.
You may want to experiment with tracking sensitivity to see what works best for you and how you shoot. Set it to a custom button so you can change it quickly to see how it effects you. If you're tracking a specific player, stickier settings like 2 or 1 can help. More responsive settings can work better if you want to focus on whoever is prominent in the frame.
