Faster focusing

Tweak your camera focus settings for quicker performance

EOS camera focusing systems are highly developed tools with a myriad of options to suit them to a huge range of subjects. All this flexible capability means that you might not be working with the focus system as efficiently as possible and missing pictures as a result.

When your subject is unpredictable, fast-moving and only appears briefly, you need to have the camera ready and set up properly. If not then you’ll take a while to get the right settings and miss the photo opportunity. For me this means I can readily change the location of my AF point, and on the right cameras change the AF area too.

One of the best configurations is to change the multi-controller to provide direct selection of the AF points. You’ll usually find it in the camera’s custom controls. Direct selection of AF points means that your thumb on the back of the camera can change the AF points whilst the camera is in front of your face. If you’ve got an EOS 7D Mark II or EOS 5D Mark IV you can also have the AF Area Selection lever set to change between the different AF areas easily. These two settings speed up the way I take pictures with my cameras.

With so many choices of AF area it can be a lot of taps on the AF Area Selection lever to get between the AF areas that you want to work with. Of course, this is faster if you disable any AF areas that you don’t use. On the 5D Mark IV there are seven different arrangements of the AF points. I mostly use just three of them. I turn off the ones I don’t use, which means I’m faster at changing the AF area. With only three areas active I must press the AF area selection button just three times, instead of seven, to get around all the AF area selections that I use.

First seen on the Canon EOS 7D, orientation-linked AF points can be another incredible timesaver. Simply change the camera from landscape to portrait orientation and the AF points move automatically. There are three different orientations: level, grip-up and grip-down. One some cameras you can also have different AF areas for each orientation too.

I continue to be amazed at the number of photographers I meet who have never optimized their camera for their kind of photography!

Ask Brian! Confused with your Canon DSLR? Email EOSSOS@ futurenet.com You need to be able to move AF points around the frame when capturing fast action using AI Servo tracking focus

If there are too many AF area selections to choose from it can be slow to move between the ones that you prefer to use