I realize now that my D500 is not defective, that all d500s are behaving this way. I've been trying different settings myself over the past three weekends. The wood ducks come to my backyard pond before sunrise each morning to feed on corn that I toss out. Later in the morning they leave. So each morning that I'm in my blind, I get six to a dozen flight opportunities as they take off. The first morning I had no luck with AF whatsoever. The second morning I found that setting CSM a3: blocked shot to 5 (delayed) and subject motion to erratic increased the in-focus shots tremendously. This change in itself, gave me a success rate that exceeded what Id been able to get with the D800. On the 4 mornings since then, I've mainly been alternating between single point and d72. I can't seem to see a difference in success rate between the two. That is what led me to believe dynamic AF was broken. That and the fact that the lcd always displayed initial user selected focus point.
I was re-reading my D800 and D500 manuals since my first post earlier today and I did find that the shooting info display of focus point has changed from the D800 to D500. The D800 will show the actual AF point used (if focus achieved) in all modes except Auto Area AF. The D500 however will only show initial user selected AF point for all modes except 3D and Auto Area AF (in those cases it shows camera selected AF point). Don't understand the change, but it does seem to indicate that something different is going on (Possibly related to the fact that only 55 of the 153 focus points are capable of being displayed? But then why can it show camera selected focus point in 3D and Auto Area AF?)
I hope you can shed some light on how we are supposed to use dynamic AF. With my limited experience so far, I've been unable to see any significant difference between it and single point. The improvement in my success rate so far seems solely due to change in focus lock on parameters.
Mar 12, 2017 at 03:56 PM
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