Best Nikon Z6 II AF settings for Portraits

yeah but can you do that autofocus modes the best portrait autofocus modes for the nikon z62 thank you b h for letting us play with the nikon z62 now before we talk about autofocus we should talk about assessing yourself okay because the technology in these cameras the automated technology like eye autofocus and tracking and all these decisions you need to make before you snap the shutter a lot of it has to do with assessing the situation as a photographer so are you shooting at a shallow depth of field are you shooting with a really busy background that's going to confuse the camera and even more importantly are you shooting things that can be replicated again like are you just shooting a portrait session where you can if the camera doesn't focus have the model do it again or have the kid do it again if you're shooting once in a lifetime events you as a photographer maybe you're shooting your first couple of weddings sometimes you need to decide like i'm not going to rely on the camera sort of picking out the right spot to focus so we should really talk about don't forget that you as a skilled photographer should still be able to like use a single focus point and focus using the correct mode single focus mode sometimes you know so a lot of these automated uh a lot of these automated modes are great but you as the photographer need to decide which mode works best for which situation so don't forget that now you're smarter than your camera so for example if you have a row like four rows of family members you really shouldn't be shooting at 1.4 you know that is a depth of field issue so i've gotten photographers that say you know why are my images blurry and you should know that the camera can only if you're shooting at 1.4 can only focus at a certain depth okay so the lesson here is you need to be smarter than your camera with that said i found that the nikon z62 is excellent at taking portraits but you need to understand the modes that will work best in the certain situations now i didn't do any tests this all comes from just portrait shoot after portrait shoot after portrait shoot figuring out for me what works best so i'll share that in this video but try to assess like how you shoot if you're a slower shooter because i shoot like a maniac i'm i'm trying to like get kids to laugh and and be themselves in front of i'm not working with models so that's one thing to know is like what's the patience of your subject are you working with babies and toddlers that's one thing or are you working with a model that is used to being there for three hours hair and makeup and just waiting for you to like move your focus point to their eye so part of it is what type of subject are you shooting as well what what's portraiture are you doing okay all right so we're gonna look at a little family session i did yesterday and i found that for most situations using the wide area uh auto afi i think that's what it's called the camera did a group a groud that's good to great really good to really great job at always finding an eye now on the camera i do have the little red box to show me after where the camera focused but i suspect that that little box needs a software update i found that a while overall a wide area with the eye autofocus enabled if your background isn't too busy is a really good mode to stay on for most of the time during your portrait session now there are a couple of times where this could be dangerous uh again like i talked about if it's once in a lifetime i don't know if i would rely a hundred percent on the iaf because it could get confused sometimes if people turn their head and also if the background is a little busy so i found a couple of times with the family shoot we were shooting in front of a brick wall and the camera the problem is with the eye autofocus is if it doesn't find an i it will default to face and quickly if it doesn't find the face it's going to go into an auto zone which is a grid and you could get lucky the grid could totally pick a person but the problem with that is sometimes it may pick the wrong thing so when i was photographing my family in front of a brick wall it for the most part the eye because i think their heads were maybe a little too small in the frame the it looked try the camera tried to find a face and then it went into a grid which grabbed onto the wall in the back now the good thing is while you're shooting you do see the grid and to me that's like an alarm when i'm using wide area i autofocus and i see the grid that takes over the entire screen i know the camera is confused and so i need to make a decision that means that the background is either too busy or it can't see the faces because they're a little too small and so that's where your skill as a portrait photographer with the nikon c6 z62 needs to come into play you need to quickly switch into another mode and i found that the second best mode for portraiture is just to forget eye autofocus altogether now i know that you can put wide area with face you know you can pick a red box which the the camera will only look for an eye there i just found personally for me i like interacting with my subjects and i don't like moving a focus box around i'd rather either just have a center focus that i can focus and recompose and not take the time into moving the box if i turn the camera vertical moving the box up to find an eye and then you turn to landscape and you have to move the box because the person is on the left i find that a little it takes a little too long for me that may work for you using the face you know red box and moving that around but i found that if the camera got confused i would move to a single area so if the camera grid would come on i would use my function button on the front and quickly since i've memorized how many clicks it takes to move to the next mode i would switch to the wide area no face detection because i found that that wide and the small which is the little area the little the little square box in the middle when i was shooting track meets i found that that guy was really good at grabbing on and staying on barely missed any track images using that on continuous so i would go from wide face to sort of that middle box most of the time during the portrait session all right so let me show you some real world examples of where i assess the situation and pick a mode all right so here i put the dude on a railing and this is pretty simple for the camera wide area auto focus and i found that the camera could find an eye no problem even if he looks away or he looks at me piece of cake now if you have two people and you're shooting portraits and you're shooting shallow like i like to shoot shallow here this is again at 1.4 very dangerous 1.4 and two people but i know that if i have them in the same plane i'm pretty much going to get a pretty good focus but if you don't if you're not that skilled i would recommend going to 2f2 or 2.8 for a little bit more depth here so as i shot here even though the kids turned their heads the wide area af still picked them up and uh it didn't turn into face like the zone didn't go into face it stayed on eye because all i had them do was like look at each other really quickly and then they looked back at camera this is a great technique too if you want to get people hate looking at each other you know so you get a good technique people looking at each other and when they look back they have real smiles which is the shot i'm looking for okay now i switched lenses i was using a 50 millimeter 1.4 adapted sigma lens and now i'm using the 70 70-200 2.8 z lens which is like one of the best lenses i've ever used so here i'm using single focus point but i'm still using that wide eye and the background is a little busy there's lines there's brick back there but pretty much overall the camera is picking up the eye no problem and i'm shooting in burst now if the kid moved she moved out of the plane for a second and the camera had her in focus and then it was out of focus for a millisecond and if you shoot it and then it came back to focus so um it could be that she moved out of sometimes you can't really assess why something is out of focus we're talking a millisecond here and since i'm shooting in single focus point i do if someone moves out of the focal plane i do have to pump that button again to re-grab focus so for on my sony a7 iii i shoot continuous focus 100 of the time with the nikon z series i have found that because i'm learning the system a little bit more i like to see the confirmation green dots and in continuous focus you don't get any confirmation that you have auto focus so uh here i was using single focus but later you'll see that i turn i change into continuous focus so pretty much the same thing single focus chic is always in focus here uh let's zoom in and look at the eyes so here we have iaf and here it missed once and again sometimes here it missed twice and then we're back into autofocus so the eye autofocus i would say is 80 to 85 90 hit rate maybe even higher you know i didn't do any exact tests but as you can see here these are all super sharp the eye look at that lens 70-200 video on that guy coming too best lens ever all right with four people you have a couple of choices here i decided to use the wide af as well and it found mom's eye found the kid's eye sometimes it went between two here's an example where you need to assess the situation and use eye autofocus but you probably want to keep your you want to know how much depth your lens has so here i'm i'm shooting the 50 millimeter 1.4 i moved it to 2-0 um that's dangerous by the way i would probably move if you're shooting four people you should probably be at 2.8 or f4 if you want a shallow depth of field still want a shallow depth of field uh but i got kind of got away with it here at f2 uh because i knew they were pretty much in the same focal plane uh based on my distance and that has a lot to do with too if all of a sudden i jump forward and i move closer to people then my depth goes from this much at f2 to this much and you're gonna get people that are out of focus so your understanding of depth of field and focal plane and that goes with autofocus as well so i knew here that i had enough depth so i use the iaf okay if i don't have enough depth and i need to pick i would probably go back to the single box and maybe move it around okay now with the family on the brick wall we always like to do kind of like a rock band sort of cool album shot of the family so they all look like models and here i was using the wide afi and i think their heads were a little bit too small for the camera it was finding i i then it went to face for a second and then all of a sudden it was like grid city and that's where i got a little bit nervous because grid city likes the wall in the back and so one way i could have combated this was to move them away from the wall they're a little too close to it it's a busy pattern back there and the other thing i probably could have done was just change really quickly to an autofocus box and uh for the most part it did an okay job but every now and then it would go to face detection and not detect mom's face it would focus maybe on the wall so that was a situation where i should have switched to a different mode now when i'm not using wide af auto i think my favorite one is the rectangular wide autofocus especially when you get the family moving and so here i got them to just walk towards camera i laid down on the gross ground and completely had them walking towards camera and every single shot is in focus no iaf no tracking i just used the red rectangular autofocus continuous rectangle i was about to say box but it's a rectangle and that worked great that worked great during the track meet that work great during um family members just walking up every single shot is in focus now we should talk also about your burst rate so for portraits i'm not shooting 20 frames a second 12 frames a second 14 frames a second that's kind of ridiculous for portraits so you should at least be i'm at like five frames a second that's what i need to get images so five frames a second to me gives me expression enough in auto focus and what i'm looking for now for shooting vertical either full length portraits or three quarter i like that rectangular box i don't need to go to eye autofocus if the person takes up most of the frame you put them in that rectangle and i'm shooting in continuous autofocus even though the kid here she's not moving forward and backward the camera does a good job and i have enough depth um i'm shooting 3.2 with the 70 to 200 and it grabs focus just pretty much every single time um i would say a hundred percent here we have enough depth she's not doing anything super crazy forward and backward and so the camera found her every single time so i don't need to go to iaf because as soon as she flips her hair around the camera's like what brick wall you know so i'm gonna stick to that rectangle and it just knows the contrast there that it needs to stay on her the whole time and she did all kinds of crazy stuff now i did get her to walk forward and it grabbed focus every single time with her coming in now same brick wall in the background and have mom and daughter hugging now what mode do i use well you could stay on the rectangle continuous they're in the middle the rectangle is in the middle but i decided to use wide af here as well i just quickly switched to wide af and here it just grabbed eye autofocus you can also since the rectangle's in the middle you could actually change to face in the rectangle and you got to get quick you got to get quick with the different modes and see them and uh this worked great so iaf the rectangle was in the right spot i know when i go landscape sometimes if you have uh you know face detection the rectangle's not reaching their face so you actually have to use the joystick to move up so that's why i usually like the wide af now we should also talk about i'm gonna go back to skill of photographer these moments these are real moments because i'm talking and interacting and loving the family as well if you're fumbling with your camera and focus modes you're not really going to get great expressions so you have to either stick it to single focus point and work with the family or know how to switch on the fly memorize your auto focus settings to get better expressions from your clients now i will say that you can limit the number of autofocus choices so you can go right from wide you know you can tell the camera don't ever if i'm flipping the dial don't go to pinpoint don't go to a tiny box just always go to the rectangle and go to an eye now this in front of green and a kid standing there wide afi no freaking problems a full length kid here wide af eye no freaking problems he's not moving the camera finds his eye i'm shooting at 1.4 no freaking problems even two people shooting at 1.4 found the face no you know what i'm going to say no freaking problems again a full length i'm on wide autofocus i'm also shooting continuous now so before i said i was liking a confirmation but after a while i was seeing that i was getting a lot of uh hits with uh continuous focus so i kind of just stayed on wide af continuous even though the kid isn't moving so i prefer on my sony a73 that i get green confirmation that lives full time on a continuous but it's okay it's okay it grabbed now the camera does sometimes miss focus and you can't explain it so here i'm on continuous autofocus it wavers a little bit it wavered off his face for some reason i do have some green things on the foreground but it never focused on those but then it quickly snapped back i went from 70 millimeters i zoomed in a little bit to 87 millimeters and it found his face the whole time we got a great laugh here um and he looks awesome he's totally in focus in all of these all right now we're shooting at 200 millimeters and you have to assess how tiny is the subject's head in the frame so here it would find eye but then it would go to face and then it would go to grid it was deciding and as soon as i see the camera deciding is i get a little nervous okay so if you see the camera deciding i would say pick something that's a little bit more reliable and what i did was i went to my rectangle okay rectangle center i know it's gonna find them and it did a great job especially when we had him walking forward we got the rectangle no face just rectangle and it completely grabbed every shot as he's walking forward and so that's my kind of my way of thinking when i am shooting the z62 center that's reliable and a wide af i'll see you next time peace you

Channel: Omar Gonzalez Photography

Views: 16,420

Rating: 4.8830085 out of 5

Keywords: photography, cameras, lenses, omar gonzalez photography, portraits, nikon, nikon z, nikon z6, nikon z6ii, z6, autofocus for portraits, is nikon autofocus good?

Id: av1isz6U1M8

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021