Canon R5 II R5 Mk II focus issue

[Bryan wilburn]

Overall I love the R5 Mk II, but sometimes I just want to kick the camera. I was driving down the padre Island Nat Seashore Sunday and spotted a rare visitor to the area, a Semipalmated Plover.

I framed the shot and waited for the "eye finder" to lock onto the birds eye, then I shot a dozen frames.
When I was processing the shots I just wanted to scream. You can see the "Focus Point" was clearly on the eye, but the actual focus point was several feet behind the bird in the surf.

This is not a rare happening but is actually a quite frequent error.

 

[chipman]

I had a similar shot a couple of years ago with my R7. I was told the bright points of reflection in the water from the sun messes with the AF.
Don't know if that's right or not.

 

[Archibald]

I get this pretty often with the R7. The AF finds the eye, but then inexplicably focuses on the background. It happens especially with distant subjects.

Since I know it does this, I usually shoot many frames of a subject, with some of them using eye detect and others single point. I delete the OOF frames and hope there are sharp frames left. I didn't know the R5 II also did this.

 

[PKM-UK]

Hi Bryan,

Sorry to hear of your angst, it must be extremely frustrating. Although I've seen people report such instances with their R7's, Karen's is generally very reliable with regards to hit rate/ back focusing and, as far as I can recall, I rarely experienced this issue with my R5 - and my R5 II has been pretty much flawless (well, so far!).

There's no exif data with your image (a screen save?) so if you're after advice it may help people to suggest things you could consider with your set-up/ technique if you could you provide some details, e.g. lens, camera settings (particularly those touching on AF along with shutter speed, aperture etc...) and general conditions, e.g. how far away was the subject, was it a particularly hot day, windy, hazy/ sea spray, were you using a lens hood?

(I appreciate nothing will get the shot back, but hopefully next time you'll absolutely nail it).



Phil

 

[Philnick]

The red box is not "successful AF" but an attempt to find the bird's head. When it has achieved focus, the box turns green.

Try manually focusing on the bird before activating AF - that will improve the chances of the AF system locking on.

PS Some YouTube bird shooters recommend not trying to keep Servo AF focused on the same point for a long time but to "pulse" the focus button.

 

[Archibald]

The AF box turns green or blue when shooting. Afterwards when reviewing the shot, a red box (optionally) shows where the AF point was when the shot was taken.

There's a possibility that the subject moved after focus was achieved, but I don't think that was the issue here.