Steve Spencer wrote:
But we don't even know he aimed at the building and we don't know if he was in MF or BBF, and he can't remember to tell us, so we can't infer anything. There are a lot of hypotheticals here and you and even the shooter can't answer them.
Since he framed the building and there is no motion blur, chances are he hit the exposure button and AF tried to focus on the building. Also, if he had accidentally engaged AF while the camera was pointing down, he would have no focus or very close focus - both look very different from what we see. But yes, we don't know if he was in MF or BBF mode. I am no longer a member on dpreview. If you are, why don't you ask him?
Jan 05, 2026 at 11:47 AM
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Nielk Mike wrote:
Since he framed the building and there is no motion blur, chances are he hit the exposure button and AF tried to focus on the building. Also, if he had accidentally engaged AF while the camera was pointing down, he would have no focus or very close focus - both look very different from what we see. But yes, we don't know if he was in MF or BBF mode. I am no longer a member on dpreview. If you are, why don't you ask him?
I am not a member of dpreview and I have never been. Further he made it clear in his post that he didn't know or remember what he did with focus for this shot. Like I said, you are making assumptions when we can't know what he did and even he can't remember what he did. We simply cannot know what happened with focus for this shot, so I don't think we can infer that the system caused the problems with focus rather than the user. I think it is at least as likely that the problem was user error and even the user acknowledged that possibility.
I posted this earlier, but I updated a few things, so reposting:
I’m going to go out on a limb here (and potentially open myself up to having been wrong in the past) but I have seen some issues with Fujifilm zoom lenses (not necessarily just wide angle) where AF’ed images can exhibit unexpected softness like what MIke describes — though I can’t say whether his “to infinity and beyond” analysis is exactly what is happening.
Here’s what I’ve been trying to sort out:
when using my Fujifilm primes (14mm, 23mm, 27mm, 35mm, 50mm, 60mm, 80mm, 90mm) I get consistently accurate AF performance at all distances. However… using my Fujifilm zoom lenses (16-55mm v1, 50-140mm, 100-400mm I get more images OOF at distance than I should and more than I get with my Canon zooms of my FF system.
It has even happened while I was controlling variables and testing for this with the camera in the tripod and using a remote release and EFCS. And, to be sure, in these cases it was not case of operator error or of focusing closer than the primary target — I checked for this.
I think, but I’m not certain yet that the issue crops up mostly when there are subjects at distance, and not with closer subjects. This has perplexed me. In fact, when I’ve tested the lenses I’ve gotten very sharp images using AF at less-than-big distances while getting softer images at greater distances. (I first noticed this when photographing birds with the 100-400 and assumed that it might be related to less optimal tracking of moving objects, but I’ve seen it with stationary subjects at distance, too... including photos of completely stationary birds.)
I’m going to do some more testing to see if I can nail down what is happening.
My experience does not correlate precisely with what Mike reports. For example, he and I had a go-around a year or more (two years?) when he reported this “beyond infinity”issue with wide angle Fujifilm primes. I had never seen it with such lenses and I went to some lengths to try to replicate it but never saw it in that situation. I decided with great confidence that the issue does not exist for me with a range of Fujifilm’s primes.
Nielk Mike wrote:
You don't get it. It is not about uninformed missing focus - it is about Fuji AF focusing beyond infinity. Of course, you are way too professional to ever encounter this with a Fuji. So good light and have fun.
No, YOU are insisting it's a Fuji specific problem, and it is not, at least not for me with virtually every lens I own, Fuji or 3rd party. But then I know how to use its AF to make it work properly for me...
Even if it did accidentally go past infinity occasionally, it doesn't really matter too much. I don't believe a 100% accurate af system exists, pretty hard to get anything 100% accurate actually.
I'm currently using an old DSLR, so I'm kinda like, the af missed, what else is new. I think the main reason people don't like 18-55's may just be because they missed focus, some lenses are not very accurate
Cliff L. wrote:
This looks like the typical result oneoften gets from taking a camera out of a warm car into cold air and taking a photo - regardless of brand.
Did a lot of bird photography at one point. Shooting out of a warm car using a telephoto when its cold out: forget it.
I'm fully aware Fuji cameras can miss focus, and can focus past infinity if trying to shoot a low contrast subject at infinity but I fail to see what the problem is. For any critical work I would choose manual focus, for tracking moving subjects focus past infinity is not going to be an issue and for landscape work with a wide lens, ie will have some foreground, I would never want near infinity or at infinity focus in the first place.
We have no idea what af settings he used for the original photo. The photographer can't remember, so why get exercise jumping to conclusions?
I would have used MF, or if feeling lazy then single point af-s or BBF.
And checked for good focus before and after exposure. Using that working practice I have had no more mis fires with Fuji using 18-55 or 14, 23, 35 etc primes than with other systems, apart from early Nikon which would fail much more often. Any fly by wire AF lenses can 'focus beyond infinity' so can come to rest there if AF is not used, or fails to lock on to sharp focus.
AF is an aid to the photographer, it has limitations and failure rates, just like any other automation. I don't believe Fuji is any worse than others at this basic level, it is not my experience compared to Sony and Nikon slr I have owned.
I have been looking at the posts in this thread, and cannot help thinking that focus beyond infinity is a practical impossibility, in the simple sense that this implies that the decision on where to focus was delegated to the camera, and the person behind the camera just pushed the shutter without thinking. However, in real life, this couldn't happen to those who are familiar with basic ideas such as the hyperfocal distance, for instance?
I am willing to be corrected, of course. If, actually, there are situations in landscape photography when it is better to focus at or near infinity, I would like to know when this can be appropriate or beneficial. When using AF, my usual way of focusing is with a small spot. When no prominent subject is present in a scene, and no obvious place to focus, I tend to have the focusing spot a bit under the center of the scene. Thus, going back to what I have already said, I fail to understand how focusing beyond infinity could happen, in practice. Am I missing something?
ruthenium wrote:
I have been looking at the posts in this thread, and cannot help thinking that focus beyond infinity is a practical impossibility, in the simple sense that this implies that the decision on where to focus was delegated to the camera, and the person behind the camera just pushed the shutter without thinking. However, in real life, this couldn't happen to those who are familiar with basic ideas such as the hyperfocal distance, for instance?
I am willing to be corrected, of course. If, actually, there are situations in landscape photography when it is better to focus at or near infinity, I would like to know when this can be appropriate or beneficial. When using AF, my usual way of focusing is with a small spot. When no prominent subject is present in a scene, and no obvious place to focus, I tend to have the focusing spot a bit under the center of the scene. Thus, going back to what I have already said, I fail to understand how focusing beyond infinity could happen, in practice. Am I missing something?...Show more →
The only thing you’re missing is we have a participant here that has been attempting to convince us that focus beyond infinity is an inherent Fuji defect that does not exist in any other camera. He is of course wrong, but that won’t stop him from beating the dead horse. He usually proffers a couple similar threads here each year. Oh, the reason he doesn’t have access to DPR is he was eventually banned for continually posting similar there — but clearly he still follows them
PS: To be clear, I actually like the person in question and enjoy most of his posts here even though we rarely agree. I just wish he’d give up this particular “Fuji infinity focus” battle 👍
ruthenium wrote:
I have been looking at the posts in this thread, and cannot help thinking that focus beyond infinity is a practical impossibility, in the simple sense that this implies that the decision on where to focus was delegated to the camera, and the person behind the camera just pushed the shutter without thinking. However, in real life, this couldn't happen to those who are familiar with basic ideas such as the hyperfocal distance, for instance?
I am willing to be corrected, of course. If, actually, there are situations in landscape photography when it is better to focus at or near infinity, I would like to know when this can be appropriate or beneficial. When using AF, my usual way of focusing is with a small spot. When no prominent subject is present in a scene, and no obvious place to focus, I tend to have the focusing spot a bit under the center of the scene. Thus, going back to what I have already said, I fail to understand how focusing beyond infinity could happen, in practice. Am I missing something?...Show more →
While 'hyperfocal' might usually be the choice for a distant landscape, there are occasions where one might want the absolute sharpest plane of focus to be at 'infinity' and only use made of the DoF in the foreground. I often do this with large mountain masses, Alps etc, where the main 'interest' is the very distant peaks.
I all these cases AF is entirely redundant ironically. Give me a good MF lens with accurate hard stop infinity any day for that sort of thing.
gyoung143 wrote:
While 'hyperfocal' might usually be the choice for a distant landscape, there are occasions where one might want the absolute sharpest plane of focus to be at 'infinity' and only use made of the DoF in the foreground. I often do this with large mountain masses, Alps etc, where the main 'interest' is the very distant peaks.
I all these cases AF is entirely redundant ironically. Give me a good MF lens with accurate hard stop infinity any day for that sort of thing.
Gerry
There is no such thing as an “accurate hard stop infinity” even with a manual focus lens. They ALL have to allow extra focus room BEYOND infinity to compensate for thermal expansion in the lens system.
gyoung143 wrote:
While 'hyperfocal' might usually be the choice for a distant landscape, there are occasions where one might want the absolute sharpest plane of focus to be at 'infinity' and only use made of the DoF in the foreground. I often do this with large mountain masses, Alps etc, where the main 'interest' is the very distant peaks.
I all these cases AF is entirely redundant ironically. Give me a good MF lens with accurate hard stop infinity any day for that sort of thing.
Gerry
Gerry, one the one hand, I tend to believe others more, rather than less. On the other hand, I am a typical "Doubting Thomas" when it comes to hard facts. In your example, I would like to see for myself how the sharpness of the very distant peaks should change, and when it should change, if the focusing distance is shortened stepwise. In practice, for example, I would like to see a series of photos focused with an AF small spot: first with the spot on the peaks, then with this spot nudged down (e.g. with the camera joystick) the scene, assuming that the area under the very distant peaks in the scene extends toward the camera. I am not at all convinced that I would see an immediate change in sharpness of the peaks. In other words, I am not convinced that achieving the ultimate sharpness on the very distant peaks requires focussing near infinity. If you actually tested this and indeed found out that focussing near infinity is critical - then I am willing to take your word!
Dmitri
ruthenium wrote:
I have been looking at the posts in this thread, and cannot help thinking that focus beyond infinity is a practical impossibility, in the simple sense that this implies that the decision on where to focus was delegated to the camera, and the person behind the camera just pushed the shutter without thinking. However, in real life, this couldn't happen to those who are familiar with basic ideas such as the hyperfocal distance, for instance?
I am willing to be corrected, of course. If, actually, there are situations in landscape photography when it is better to focus at or near infinity, I would like to know when this can be appropriate or beneficial. When using AF, my usual way of focusing is with a small spot. When no prominent subject is present in a scene, and no obvious place to focus, I tend to have the focusing spot a bit under the center of the scene. Thus, going back to what I have already said, I fail to understand how focusing beyond infinity could happen, in practice. Am I missing something?...Show more →
I quit using hyperfocal focusing a long time ago. Those dof scales on the old lenses are wildly optimistic, you kinda have to pick what you want in focus. Stopping down does help some, though
Dof calculators are presumably the same numbers as scales on old lenses, unless you can change circle of confusion
SGinNorcal wrote:
If you want to get technical, "beyond infinity" is the same as infinity. I paid attention to my 9th grade math teacher.
On a lens, “infinity” is a focus position that would theoretically make subjects at infinity be in focus. Focusing “beyond infinity” simply means moving the focus setting on the lens to a point beyond the infinity focus setting.
Technically, I guess it isn’t “focusing beyond infinity, but rather it is setting the lens focus beyond its infinity setting.
The queston raised in this thread (and in a bunch of antecedent threads) by our OP is whether Fujjifilm’s AF moves the focus adjustment past the point at which the lens would focus on infinity.
The OP also asserts this is a problem with Fuji wide zooms. Wanting to focus on distant mountains is mostly going to involve telephoto compositions. Wide angle lens compositions always have something in the foreground that one would want to focus on.
SGinNorcal wrote:
If you want to get technical, "beyond infinity" is the same as infinity. I paid attention to my 9th grade math teacher.
Which is why I always put 'beyond infinity' in quotes. Technically you are reducing the distance between the nodal point of the lens from the recording medium to less than the focal length. Phraseology introduced with lenses with aspheric and other exotic glass elements which are susceptible to a change in focal length affected by temperature. So the focussing helical has to allow movement beyond the marked infinity which is engraved for a 'normal' temperature range. M ost lenses are not significantly affected by temperature variation, in my MF 'collection' the only lens I ever have had (and still have) is a Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 AiS.
AF mechanisms have to do it to allow the system to go beyond any point of focus and return to a sharpest point arrived at by going backwards and forwards till 'focus' is achieved. My early Nikon af, F 801, will hunt backwards and forwards 'forever' given a low contrast subject.
