Nikon Mirrorless AF Modes And Settings

[Music] hey everyone Steve for backcountry gallery here in this time around I want to talk about the AF settings on the nikon mirrorless cameras in this video we'll discuss focus modes AF area modes and even a bunch of custom settings that will help you get the most from your Z Series camera of course I'll also talk about what to use and when plus give you lots of setup advice however Before we jump into the meat of this video I want to mention that the tips here are intended you just kind of get you started if you want more in-depth info and honestly you'll get a lot more out of a camera if you do check out my new mirrorless edition of the Nikon autofocus book in fact what you're about to learn here is less than 5% of the advice you'll find in that book also I primarily use back button AF for all my subjects action or still however these settings work the same regardless of whether you shutter release AF or back button F so let's go ahead and jump in single or continuous AF the first decision is if you want to use continuous or single AF if you're using back button a half like I do the choice is easy is set your camera on continuous and just leave it however if you prefer focusing using your shutter release you'll have to pick a mode depending on what you're shooting fortunately this is really easy single AF allows you to lock in focus and it will hold focus at that point at that distance as long as you keep the shutter button halfway pressed this is ideal for when you want to focus and recompose with a static subject however if the subject is moving the AF won't follow that subject that's where continuous AF comes in for moving subjects continuous AF will adjust the focus under the AF area and try to keep it sharp all the time this works great when you're AF Square is on your subject however it's impossible to focus and recompose reliably since as soon as there's something new under your AF sensor it'll refocus on that point bottom line for static subjects stick with single AF for moving subjects or when using back button AF choose continuous AF oh and as a side note that's why I typically use back button I can leave the camera in continuous AF mode all the time and if I need to lock in a set focus distance I simply focus at that distance and then let go of the AF on button as long as I don't refocus the lens the camera will keep focused set to that specific distance just like we have with AFS for more info on back button AF see my auto focus book or my back button AF video now there are a few additional side notes here as well first not every AF area mode works in both AFS and AF see for example pinpoint AF only works in AF s mode and dynamic only in AF C mode second if you have a Z 50 and possibly other mirrorless cameras down the road will be included in this you'll notice an option for something called AF a this option lets the camera decide if it should use AFS or AFC for a given subject in my experience it's better just to pick the proper mode yourself from the Gecko because sometimes a if they can get it wrong we'll talk about how to change to different focus modes as well as changing to different AF area modes in just a few moments since they often go together for now let's talk about the various AF area modes at our disposal and what they do AF area modes next we have the AF area modes on our Z cameras this includes single point the wide areas both the large and the small dynamic auto and pin point so let's take a quick look at each one single point this is the most common AF area and it's exactly what it sounds like just a single AF point this works well for the majority of subject and is by far my most frequently used AF area whatever is under the AF point is what the camera is going to focus on and the small size offers you a high level of precision with this I use this for any static work as well as slower moving wildlife and even some action dynamic mode this is like single point AF but with a little assistance if things start moving a bit faster or if I'm on an unstable platform like a pontoon boat or a kayak I'll switch to dynamic a good way to tell when it's time to switch to dynamic from single point is when you start having a tough time keeping the single AF point consistently on target in fact a way to think of dynamic AF is like assisted single point AF with dynamic you use the AF sensor in the middle of the AF area as your primary point just like if you are shooting single point AF however there are helper points all around it and a square form by the little dots shows you the edges of that area the way it works is you start with a primary point and focus on your target if you happen to fall off that target and that target is still within the AF area one of the helper points will take over until you get back on target again however if that helper point loses a lot your primary endpoint will focus on whatever is currently under it sometimes the wrong part of the subject sometimes the background or the foreground so dynamic works best when you can mostly keep a single AF point on the subject but you do need a little bit of help from time to time wide AF areas when the action starts to heat up a little bit more I'd like to switch to one of the wide AF areas especially the wide small area in fact I use the wide small area for most of my action work with the Z cameras the wide areas work a little like group AF in our DSLRs the single square is made up of multiple a of points and the system tries to prioritize whatever is closest to the camera it doesn't work quite as well as group AF for close focus priority at least not at the moment but it definitely does get the job done the trick with these modes is that they don't offer the precision of single point or dynamic well they do tend to focus on whatever is closest to the camera if that doesn't qualify it has a good AF target they may focus on something else under the AF area box this usually isn't an issue of the box covers enough of a subject but for smaller subjects it can actually become a problem in my experience if the subject is actually smaller than the AF area you do run the risk of the camera jumping to the background especially if it's a nice contrasting background in those cases dynamic often works better since the smaller primary AF point isn't larger than the subject still both of the wide modes work fairly well and are definitely my first choice for tracking subjects moving it fast like bird in flight type speeds auto area AF next we have the auto AF Aria and that is sort of like a three in one that includes auto AF a area face and eye detection and tracking mode let's take them all one at a time first the Auto AFA in this mode the camera calls the shots and will attempt to determine what your subject is and focus on that it has a tendency to gravitate towards human faces even if you have face detection turned off for non human subjects it's a bit more hit and miss usually but not always prioritizing what's closest in the frame it does a good job but it sometimes can jump to the wrong area of the photo and there's very little you can do to get it back where you want it when that happens still I think it actually works better than auto AF in our like Nikon DSLR so that's a plus I tend to use it for really fast tracking scenarios where I just can't seem to keep one of the normal AF areas on the subject small fast things like you know little bird stuff like that this works especially well when the subject is against a clean background and there aren't a lot of other distractions in the area next we have face detection and on some of the Z series cameras eye detection modes as well the first step though is to enable these so press the menu button and head to the custom settings menu and we'll take a look so we want to go to the custom setting menu and we're looking for auto focus in this case give that a click and what you're looking for is the auto area AF face / eye detection option and we're just going to go ahead and give that a click and you'll see your choices in here we have face and eye detection we can turn that on we have face detection that we can just use that without the eye detection on supported cameras at this time it's just the Z 6 and a Z 7 you'll have animal detection and as of this video it's just really for pets I've tried it with wildlife and the results aren't so hot and then of course you can just turn the entire thing off if you don't want to have the camera trying to find eyes when you're in the auto AF aria mode so those are our choices let's talk about each one of them first space detection and remember this only works if you're in the auto AFR you mode when the system detects a face it will put a box around that face if it sees more than one face it'll put a little arrow on the box as well to switch to another face just press the multi selector in the direction of the arrow that's pointing to the face you want note that this works really well as long as the face is more or less towards the camera it generally won't detect faces in profile or turned away from the camera it will also miss faces if they are just a little too far away in the event the camera doesn't see a face it'll simply use Auto AF high-tech ssin works the same way only instead of a box around the entire face it will put a box around the eye if the system sees multiple eyes it will put a little arrow or arrows on the side of the box and you can use the multi selector to choose another eye this works well for closer range subjects but as you move farther out it will switch to face detection if it doesn't detect an IR face it will again use standard-issue auto airy AF some cameras also feature animal line detection in my experience this works better for like cats and dogs than wildlife subjects in fact I would not recommend it for wildlife at this time most of the time it won't see the eye of a non canine or non feline and it leaves you at the mercy of the somewhat random selection of the auto AF Aria as for usage it works just like IAF for people that we talked about a moment ago the final component of the Auto AF Aria is tracking mode and tracking mode you place a box around the subject and the camera will attempt to stick with that subject as you focus note that I recommend using this mode in AF C and not AF s mode since most of the time if you're tracking something you don't want the camera to lock in a set focus distance but you rather you want the camera to change the distance as the subject moves right to use it simply press the ok button while in the auto AF aria and you'll see a little white box pop up place the box over your target and initiate auto focus in AF C mode as long as you focus the box will continue to track the subject around the viewfinder when you stop focusing the AF box will return to white finally to get out of tracking mode just press the Zoom Out button and it'll shut it off and you'll be back to the regular auto area AF also note that some of the Z cameras the c6 and z7 as of this video allow you to assign a different button for subject tracking let's take a quick look okay so I have the z7 here I'm gonna go ahead and hit the menu button and in this case we want to go down to the custom setting menu controls give that a click custom control assignment and give that a click and we have all of our little buttons here and in this case I actually assign this to the lens function button but for our demonstration because not everybody has lens function buttons on their lenses we're just gonna assign it to the FN one button so right now that has spot meter I'm gonna give this a click and I'm just gonna scroll down until I find subject tracking it's right there just give that a click and now fn1 has subject tracking so now when I'm in the auto a of area mode all I have to do is tap that FN one button and it will instantly go into tracking mode it's very very handy and when I want to get out of tracking mode I just tap the assign button again and I'm instantly out of it I don't have to go down to the Zoom Out button so this is way more convenient and much more intuitive to use but I do want to give you a side note if you happen to use lenses that have lens function buttons on them I really do prefer having my tracking mode on the lens function button it's very handy it's literally by your finger so it's like oh I'm in auto mode I need to start tracking just give it a tap and as a side note it's not just native Zee lenses that support this if you happen to have an adaptive lens that has function buttons something like say a 500 P F this will work with those function buttons as well so pretty darn cool and by the way though if you are using an adaptive lens with function buttons a lot of times you have to put it into the AE - l mode in order to make that work and that's a little switch on the side of the lens but anyhow I just want to point that out because I think on the lens is probably the best place for it but but anyhow that's how you put subject tracking on a programmable button and by the way it's just the FN one FN - and lens function buttons that support it at this time so I want you to use tracking mode well I find it works best when the subject is a distinctly different color from the background and that subject is moving at like slow to moderate speeds my luck with it for fast-moving wildlife subjects hasn't been that great so I stick with one of the previously mentioned AF areas when the action really heats up still it can work well for a variety of action scenarios just don't stick with it if you find it's not sticking to your subject very well pinpoint AF this mode uses an AF points that's somewhere between a third and a quarter of the size of your normal single AF point and it allows for ultra precise focusing on very specific parts of the image it's also the only AF mode that we know for sure always uses contrast to take to F for focus so it's also potentially able to deliver the most accurate focus however keep in mind that it only works in AF s mode I tend to use pinpoint when I need like super precise focus for macro shots or what I need a very precise focus location for a landscape shot maybe if I'm using hyper focal distance most of the time however I'm perfectly happy with normal single point AF so that's about it for the AF area modes keep in mind that the explanations that we just talked about we're just to get you started that AF book I mentioned earlier goes into far greater detail for getting the most out of each AF area we talked about how they work their pros or cons or strengths their weaknesses and have lots of examples for what mode works best for what scenario still hopefully what we talked about is enough to get you started swapping focus modes and AF area modes next I want to talk about a couple of ways to swap our focus mouths and our AF area modes so let's go ahead and take a look okay so the first thing we want to do is just press the eye button and that'll bring up the eye menu and you can see we have focus mode and AF area mode here these are in the default location obviously you can move these around in your camera if you want to but these are the default location let's start with focus mode and talk about how to use that just give the okay button to click or you can tap AF see right there where you see that with your finger by the way make sure that you look for the words focus mode though because that could say AF see AFS manual whatever in there so you don't want to necessarily look for the AF see that you see highlighted on the screen here but instead look for the focused mode option that you see at the top so I'm gonna go ahead and give that a click and you can see we can switch from AFC to manual to AFS it's all right there now there is another cool trick here if you just rotate the rear command dial you can switch them a little bit quicker as long as that's highlighted I can just highlight the one that I want on top like that and go from there so right there it's AFC I hit OK or I hit a half press on my shutter release to reengage the cameras photo mode and it'll switch to that mode so that's pretty easy next we have the AF area mode and it works the exact same way I can hit the ok button here and I can switch to whichever one I want or I can just make sure it's highlighted and again just rotate that rear command dial and I can switch this way so that's a little bit faster way just highlight the one you want and boom you're there so pretty darn easy but again I think the main thing to remember here is when you're using the I menu is to look for focus mode or AF area mode at the top and not necessarily what's displayed in the little yellow boxes there assign focus modes and AF area modes to a programmable button next let's talk about another way to change our AF modes and that is by assigning them to one of your programmable buttons I have mine on the movie record button so this allows me to change my focus mode and AF mode in order to do it I just hold down my movie record button again I program this I'm going to show you how to do that in a minute I'm gonna hold that down and if you notice the AFC and wide s are now yellow they're there along the side in the screen view that you're looking at here for some reason the Z cameras put that on the side normally that's going to be at the top you'll see that at the top of your camera not along the side like you see in the screen capture here but anyway if I rotate the main command dial that's the one by your thumb I can change from AFC to manual focus to AF s and if you have Z 50 you'll have AF a in there as well which is kind of a automatic version of AF s and AF C I don't recommend using it though it's not totally reliable so I'm gonna go ahead and go to AF see now the cool thing here I am still holding my movie record button down and if I go to the front command I'll the sub command dial and rotate it if you notice I can go from wide small to wide large that's Auto there is just like standard regular single point AF there and there's dynamic so I can control both of those just by pressing my movie record button down my programmed button down and rotating the front or back command I'll them sub or main command I'll there so that's pretty cool let me show you how to program your movie record button for that too so in order to do that we're gonna just tap the menu button go down to controls and we're gonna go to custom control assignment now if you're shooting a Z 50 and possibly other Nikon's will do this as well in the future you may see custom controls then like shooting in parenthesis same thing though so let's go ahead and give that a click and what we want to do is just go over to our movie record button right here and we give that a click and you're gonna scroll down until you see focus mode /af arey mode and that is under the press and command Isles options here as you can see and just hit OK and that'll lock it in and by the way by default this is gonna normally be on your FN - button so if you've not touched these buttons at all you can do exactly what I just showed you by holding that FN - button and rotating the command dials I personally don't really like it in that location as you can see I have AE lock hold on there but I don't like it in that location so instead I put on the movie record button I think it's a little bit more convenient so there you go everything you need to know about switching AF modes and focus modes and all that good stuff custom settings finally I want to talk about a few important AF custom settings you should know we're not going to cover everything but there are a few that I think are critical for you to know and I want to mention them here so let's go ahead and do that now so let's go ahead and hit our menu button and go to the custom setting menu and you're looking for auto focus give that a click and we'll just start right at the top and the first one is AFC priority selection and we also have one for AFS right down here if you have a z6 or z7 this one's not on the Z 50 but again future cameras may or may not have it we'll talk about how to set that in a moment for now let's start with the AFC option give that a click and I recommend setting this to release now in the Z 6 and Z 7 it is set by default to release though it should be on the Z 50 however it is set to focus and I do recommend switching this to release so let's talk about what the difference is between the release modes and the focus modes here if you set this to release the camera will take a photo whenever you press the shutter even if it thinks the subject is not in focus however if you set this to focus it will only allow the shutter to release if it has a confirmed AF lock now at first it seems like setting this to focus makes more sense right after all why would you want the camera to take a photo if it wasn't sharp right well the thing is sometimes the camera doesn't have a confirmed lock but the subject is still sharp and this is especially true for action scenarios so I'd rather have a few extra photos to delete than to have the camera skipping images that it thought weren't sharp but they actually were next we have the AFS Priority Selection again you're not going to see this on the Z 50 and by default on the Z 50 it is set to focus and that's the way it is set here on my z7 as well and that is the default and that is their way I recommend using an AFS doesn't really quite work the way you expect it to if it's in release mode for some situations so leave that one in focus and next we have focus tracking with lock-on let's talk about that this option is a way for you to tell the camera what to do if you're tracking a subject in the AF area detects a drastic change in distance so for example maybe you're tracking a bird and a tree comes between the two of you how long should the camera wait before giving up on the bird and focusing on the tree that's what this setting allows you to tell the camera a setting of one tells the camera to not really wait at all a setting of five tells it to wait as long as possible it also works the other way if you're tracking a subject and you accidentally allow the AF area to slip off that subject this setting will determine how long the camera waits until it tries to switch to and start focusing on another subject so the big question is what's the best setting well it depends this really isn't a set it and forget it option plus it depends on the shooter and a situation there's really not a right or wrong answer here so I'm going to cover the benefits for both faster and slower settings first the faster settings like one or two this tells the camera that if it detects a significant change in distance under the AF area to weight a minimal amount of time before trying to lock on to whatever is currently under the AF area the setting is handy if you're switching from one target to another nearby target since you can do so without releasing the AF button put the AF area on the new subject and the camera will jump to it a split second later it's also really handy if you attempt to lock onto a subject and the AF area maybe grabs the background instead just stay on the intended subject with AF engaged and in a split second or so it should latch on to the correct target on the other hand there are advantages to the longer setting if you set this to like 4 or 5 this is telling the camera to hesitate just a little bit longer before jumping to a new subject so if you are panning along with a subject and a tree or some brush comes between you the camera won't instantly jump to that foreground it also means if you're tracking a subject and you accidentally allow the AF point to like fall off that subject the camera won't immediately try to lock on to something else as a little hint if you're new to tracking this can prove very handy now personally I've been using sort of a hybrid approach lately I set it to five but at the same time I make it my like personal responsibility to engage and disengage AF as needed if I try to focus on the camera hits the background I let off of the AF immediately I don't hold it in wait if I need to switch subjects I let off the AF i position the AF area over the new subject and then I reengage in this way I sort of have the best of both worlds if an obstacle comes between the camera and the target the camera wait as long as possible before jumping to something else if I need to quickly change subjects or make a second attempt at a subject I simply let go of the AF button for you know just a quick second and then I reengage the biggest trick here is learning to let go of the AF button when you need to it's easy like an all of the excitement to just sort of press and press and press and not remember to let go however if you could really manage your AF button this approach can actually work really well at least it has for me I can't say I use it like this like all the time but I do use it like this most of the time again though what works for me may not be the best match for you depending on your skill level your shooting style and of course what you shoot so remember to experiment also if you're not sure what to do the default setting of three really is a nice compromise next we have a focus points used and we have two choices here either all or one half every other point now this has nothing to do with AF areas or anything like that sometimes people get confused about that basically this is the number of focus points that you can select inside the viewfinder and in the past I always said use all the points if you had like a DSLR however with mirrorless and you know hundreds of AF points there's often times I find myself switching this to one half every other point when I'm doing something where composition isn't like super critical like if I'm doing wildlife I don't have to have absolute perfect composition I can always clean that up a little bit later but I do need those AF points to move around that viewfinder very rapidly for me I want to be able to select different AF points as possible so a lot of times I'll go to every other point and it works really well however when I'm doing things that I have a little more time like macros or landscapes I do prefer the all option so this is not a set it and forget it option at least for me so we'll leave it on all points for right now next we have store points by orientation and this is one of my favorite features and as you can see I do have it turned on it's a yes or no yes means on no is off and let's talk about this for a second what this store points by orientation option does is to remember where your AF area was the last time the camera was in a vertical orientation and the last time it was in a horizontal orientation and then go back to those positions when you rotate the camera so for example maybe you're photographing some birds in flight but you're also photographing some static birds as well for the flight shots you want the camera horizontal and we'll say you want the AF point just dead center for this example however there's also a pretty good-looking Heron nearby and you want to shoot some vertical shots of him but you want to use an app that Slyke more towards his head when the camera is vertical rather than moving AF points each time you can use this feature to have the camera do it for you so when you're doing the horizontal flight shots the AF point will jump to the center but when you flip the camera vertical it will move back to one of the side slash top AF sensors now to change the F point the camera uses in each orientation just move the AF point to the new location when you're in that orientation the next option is AF activation and this is basically for back button autofocus so if you don't want the shutter release to focus anymore just select AF on only and you're all set there and then it'll only focus with the back button next we have the limit AF area mode selection option let's give that a click and if you notice we have a bunch of stuff checked here these are all of the available AF area modes now when you're using a programmed button like we did with the movie record button for instance and you're scrolling through those different options if there's stuff in there you never use you can actually uncheck these options so they don't show up and it makes it a little bit quicker so for example let's say you never use the wide area or the auto AF Aria you can uncheck those and to uncheck those highlight them and press the right-hand side of the multi selector once it's all set here press the ok button or it won't remember it and now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump into photo shooting mode and show you how this works I'm gonna press the movie record button once again and again remember I do have that program to change both focus modes in AF area modes and if you watch the AF area modes here as I rotate the front sub-command dial the front command I oh there you'll see that we have dynamic we have wide small and we have single point and that's it we only have those three different AF area modes we don't have auto and we don't have the wide large anymore because I shut them off now they are available still on the ayman you can see can do all of those still here via the I menu so it's at the end of the world if you turn those off and then you can't get to them if you need them you can always get them back through the I menu there or of course you can go back to the menu and re-enable them so but anyhow that's how that works next we have focused point wraparound and this one's pretty simple we have two options to wrap or to not wrap and basically if it's no wrap like mine is when my autofocus point gets to the edge of my viewfinder it stops it won't go to the other side if I have wrap turned on on the other hand when I get to the edge of the viewfinder if I keep going it'll pop out on the other side as you see here so for me I'm gonna set that to no ramp focus point options we're gonna skip that one because it's just display options next we have low-light AF I do recommend turning that on this is an AFS mode you can't use this in AF C but it's pretty cool what it will do is in a low light situation and by the way it's just an on or off setting but in a really low light situation what this will do is it'll switch to contrast detect AF it'll turn up the gain and it'll actually allow the camera to focus in about two stops darker light than you would normally be able to with just the cameras standard AF system so very very handy I've used this for really late evening shoots and also for like nighttime stuff really nice to have on so I do recommend leaving it on there's not really any downside to leaving it on now I'm not worried about these other two options here I do cover those in the book if you want more information but there is one more option here let's go down to apply settings to Live View now this is basically an offsetting and what this does is if this is turned on it's going to show you in your viewfinder it's gonna show you what the exposure is gonna look like what the picture profile you're using is gonna look like and it's gonna show you what the white balance is gonna look like all before you take the image which is you know pretty cool however it does exact a toll on processing power when it does this now for normal situations it's not a big deal however if you're doing some action a lot of times it's nice to shut this off because I've discovered that if I'm doing action work especially fast heavy action stuff where the camera is really struggling to keep up if you shut this off it seems like the camera gets the better initial AF locks and it holds the target a little bit better and it's not a night or day difference but it is a noticeable difference I can't tell the difference when I have this on versus when I have it off so I definitely recommend if you're doing really fast heavy action turn this off but I'll tell you what most of the time though for what I do I leave this on most of time for what I do with this particular camera anyway so there you go a crash course on the nikon mirrorless 1/2 system however please keep in mind that this is less than 5% of the info found in that book I mentioned the truth is the z-series AF system has a ton of little nuances and understanding those little differences between settings and modes is the best way to get the most performance out of that camera this new book will walk you through everything in an easy-to-understand step-by-step language plus because less than like a lunch date at McDonald's check it out hey it's free to look right as always make sure you stop by my site and sign up for my free email newsletter so you never miss a blog post a video a workshop opportunity a new product or a new tip oh and I never saw your info it's only used for sending you those updates finally I love it if you hit that like button down there maybe go over and hit that subscribe button while you're at it and of course don't forget to click the little bell to get notified when I launch a new video thank you so much for watching and have a great day you

Channel: Steve Perry

Views: 71,198

Keywords: photography tips, photography help, Backcountry Gallery, Steve Perry, nature photography, Nikon mirrorless AF, Nikon mirrorless autofocus, Nikon Z AF, Nikon Z autofocus, Nikon Z-series AF, Nikon Z-Series autofocus, Nikon mirrorless autofocus modes, Nikon Z autofocus modes, Nikon mirrorless autofocus custom settings, Nikon AF modes, Nikon mirrorless autofocus areas, Nikon Z AF areas, Nikon Z-series AF area modes, Nikon mirrorless AF performance, Nikon Z6 AF, Nikon Z7 AF

Id: usZ5BxHaXVk

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020