I recently bought an R5 II with the intention of replacing my R5. However, I am not understanding how to set up the AF the way I like. On my original R5 when I half-pressed the shutter it would focus on my AF point (I like spot AF). Since I love shooting wildlife, I often just press the * button which I had programmed to detect the eyes on the animal. Rarely, however, it would get the eye wrong or perhaps I wanted to focus on another aspect of the animal, or choose to focus on a different animal in the frame, and in all such cases spot AF came in handy.
With the R5 II I can't get this to work. I have the * set to detect the eye of the animal but when I try to use spot AF I am often overridden with a focus box of varying size that chooses what it thinks I want to focus on. Yesterday, for example, I couldn't get the eye detect to recognize the eye of a basking turtle. No problem, I'll just use spot AF. WRONG! With the R5 II when I place the spot AF box over the eye the camera overrides my decision and a large focus box floated over the turtle's carapace (upper shell) and in none of my photos was the eye sharp. I want to be the decider of where to focus in spot AF, and when I want help or a quicker eye recognition I want to use the * button.
If I'm understanding you properly you need to turn off Whole area tracking AF and also change subject to detect to none. That should make it work the old school way.
Yes, with the R5, IIRC, only wide area AF worked with subject detection and the other focus point types did not. With the R5II, subject detection can be activated with all AF point types and you need to enable or disable it for each.
Additionally, when setting up a button for AF, in the set up menu for buttons, with that one active, press the INFO button to bring up the submenu of AF options to assign to the button. One of these options will be the AF point type and another will be whether or not to enable subject detection. This way, whenever you switch to this button, these submenu settings will override whatever other AF settings were active with another button.
I believe you can also assign a button turn on/off subject detection/tracking independently if you don't have this setting active in the submenu when setting up a button for AF.
