My humble 2 cents shooting professional NCAA Volleyball this past weekend.
With new firmware on A9III I saw a noticeable improvement in sticking to the subject through the net, which is always a serious challenge shooting this sport.
Interestingly, the initial capture of the far positioned subject (the server - picture below) through the net seemed to be worse compared to the previous firmware.
Well, I have been pretty happy with the A1II fw 4.0 but I have to say that when it locks onto something that is NOT what you want it to lock focus on, good luck getting it off of that unless maybe you do the trick of the custom button to remove subject detection which I think I am going to do .... today I had a boudoir photoshoot haven't done one since the firmware update, the model was topless and the autofocus was stuck on her nipple, no matter what I did, I tried S/XS focus point on her face .... nope, nipple won. I tried changing to airplane mode subject recognition ..... nipple won again, I tried auto .... you guessed it nipple won. Since I didn't want to go dig in the menus to figure out how to turn off subject recognition during the shoot I simply kept only the model's face in frame, AF, and then reframed while holding the AF and then took the shot. It was interesting to say the least. Now I have to figure out how to disable subject recognition and which button I will map it to.
71sbeetle wrote:
Well, I have been pretty happy with the A1II fw 4.0 but I have to say that when it locks onto something that is NOT what you want it to lock focus on, good luck getting it off of that.
I am not following. If there are multiple faces on the screen it doesn't "lock onto" anything by itself. You must pick one of the detected objects first, then commit to it, and only then it begins tracking. There are two steps. All my buttons are custom by now and I don't remember the original mapping to walk you through the sequence of button presses, but maybe you could benefit from reading the AF section of the manual cover to cover?
old-gregg wrote:
I am not following. If there are multiple faces on the screen it doesn't "lock onto" anything by itself. You must pick one of the detected objects first, then commit to it, and only then it begins tracking. There are two steps. All my buttons are custom by now and I don't remember the original mapping to walk you through the sequence of button presses, but maybe you could benefit from reading the AF section of the manual cover to cover?
I guess I was not clear enough sorry. The camera only recognized 1 subject, which happened to be her nipple, even though her face was not only more prominent in the frame but also about a stop brighter. No matter what I did it would show a small square on her nipple and nothing else I could select, until I reframed to only have the upper half of her face in the frame then it "saw" her eyes and let me focus on them, when I reframed there was a square on her nipple again but it stayed tracking on her eye as it was still identifying it.
edit to add: even with XS spot on her face it still did not recognize it.
71sbeetle wrote:
Well, I have been pretty happy with the A1II fw 4.0 but I have to say that when it locks onto something that is NOT what you want it to lock focus on, good luck getting it off of that unless maybe you do the trick of the custom button to remove subject detection which I think I am going to do .... today I had a boudoir photoshoot haven't done one since the firmware update, the model was topless and the autofocus was stuck on her nipple, no matter what I did, I tried S/XS focus point on her face .... nope, nipple won. I tried changing to airplane mode subject recognition ..... nipple won again, I tried auto .... you guessed it nipple won. Since I didn't want to go dig in the menus to figure out how to turn off subject recognition during the shoot I simply kept only the model's face in frame, AF, and then reframed while holding the AF and then took the shot. It was interesting to say the least. Now I have to figure out how to disable subject recognition and which button I will map it to....Show more →
I have the C5 button on mine programmed to " Subject Detect Off when held" in case a subject I'm tracking goes out of view or it does something wonky. There's a great video Bobby Tonelli did with while hanging with Sony engineers that explains it well. I use BBF so its seamless.
I also have the left press on the back wheel to toggle it on or off complexly when I don't want to use it at all.
