Sony A7III Autofocus Modes Explained

hello photographers direct support for these videos comes from sales of my video courses or the use of my affiliate links all which can be found down in the description in this video i'm going to explain the autofocus system for the sony a7iii camera now you can access most of these settings one of two ways you need to go through the actual menu on the camera or you can access a lot of this stuff using the quick menu which is accessed with the function button on the back of the camera i'm going to show you most of the stuff through the quick menu because that's the quicker and easier way to access these things so if you press this function button on the back of the camera it brings up this quick menu here and and just a note i'm in manual mode this menu option is going to be different if you're not in one of the manual modes such as manual aperture priority shutter priority or program auto now the first option we have here is the drive mode and the drive mode is tangential to the focusing system but it's not actually part of the focusing system so we're going to move over to the actual focus mode now when you're in the quick menu here you can actually see or change the options one of two ways you can spin the dial on the back of the camera to go through these options or if you press the center button it'll bring up a sidebar menu of options so we're going to use this sidebar here and you'll see that the very first option is the single shot autofocus mode and what that means is it will lock focus when you have press the shutter button on your subject and it will maintain that focus lock whether or not you move the camera until you either take a photograph or you release the shutter button so that's single shot mode that's the default mode that cameras are usually in however this camera actually comes by default in the next mode which is the afa mode so i had my change to afs afa is an automatic mode and we're going to skip that for a moment because we're first going to go down to afc afc is continuous focus continuous is exactly what it sounds like it continuously focuses on subjects as they move throughout the scene this is typically used for sports and action photography now we're going to go back up to afa because afa is an automatic mode where the camera decides whether or not to use single shot focus or to use continuous focus based on what it sees in the scene and if the subject is moving or not by the camera's detection i personally don't like this mode i like to know what my camera is going to do when i press the shutter button and i don't like to have that uncertainty but if you like this kind of mode where it's going to decide for you there's no problem with that now after these three modes which are pretty standard on every camera we have the dmf mode and dmf is a hybrid autofocus manual focus mode this is really great for close up and macro photography because what it allows you to do is start with auto focus what you can do is you can focus on your subject using the autofocus option and then you can fine-tune that focus using the focus ring on your lens which is why this is so good for macro focus and close-up photography where you want very very precise focus so i'm going to hit that function button go back into the menu hit the center button and the last option is just straight manual focus we're pressing the shutter button will not focus at all and the only way you can focus is by using the focus ring on the lens itself so those are the different focus modes you have to choose from i'm going to go back up to single shot and activate that press the function button one more time and now we're going to move over to the focus area options and i'm going to hit the center button to bring up that menu and i'm going to move back to the top by default your camera is set into the wide focus area what the wide focus area does is let the camera decide what it thinks it should focus on it'll use all of the focus points available to the camera the camera has 834 total focus points and it will pick what and where to focus in the image the next option is zone mode and with zone what you are able to do is use the joystick to move around this sort of large zone area you see this square box on the screen this is the zone that the camera is going to focus in and you can move it around so if the subject is in the upper right hand corner you could put the focus area there and then that's where the camera will focus in the scene so i'm gonna hit function again and we're gonna go back into our options and the next is center focus center is exactly what it sounds like whatever is in the center of the frame that's where the camera is gonna focus we're gonna hit function one more time go back in and now we have flexible spot m so there's flexible spot and then there's the size of that spot so this back dial here is also a set of buttons up down left and right and you'll see that there's a little left and right arrow on either side of this icon and if i press these buttons you can see it changes the size of the flexible spot you have large small medium now i don't recommend using the small option unless you are shooting close-up detail work or macro photography if you're shooting general photography and you try to use small the camera is going to have a hard time focusing so you're better off using medium for portraits and large for general photography now what flexible spot does is set a focus point that you can then move using this joystick here on the back of the camera so if we point the camera right here you'll see i can move this spot this allows you to very precisely control where the camera is going to focus now if we go back into the menu we have yet another option here which is expanded flexible spot now i mentioned based on the size of your focus point flexible spot that the camera can have difficulty focusing well expanded flexible spot is really nice because what it does is still allow you to choose a focus point wherever you want but if the camera is having difficulty focusing using that spot it'll use the adjacent spots around it to help it obtain focus so we're going to hit function again and hit the center button and go down to lock on af expanded flexible spot which is a mouthful great naming scheme sony you'll notice that that option is actually grayed out it's grayed out because this mode is only available when your drive mode is set to continuous focus so i'm gonna hit the function button and move over to the focus mode and switch that to afc for continuous and then i'm gonna hit the function button again and go back to focus area and now you can see that this option lock on af expanded flexible spot is available what this does is work with moving subjects and what happens is you have a focus area set here and the camera is going to pick the focus here you can see it's creating this box here when it tries to focus and it's going to lock on a subject that's moving and track the subject through the scene while it is moving around so i'm going to go back into the function menu and change that to my choice which is flexible spot and now we're going to actually go into the menu system and look at a few of the options in the menu system so if you tap the menu button on the back of the camera you're brought to your camera menus and we're going to move through these until we find the right options which right here is this priority set in afs and priority set in afc so these two options determine what the camera does when you press the shutter button and how the camera determines whether or not it's going to take a photo sometimes when you're trying to take a photo the camera hasn't quite obtained focus but you've already pressed that shutter button all of the way down and what these settings do is allow you to tell the camera if you want it to not take a photo until it has a solid focus lock or if you wanted to take that photo when you press the shutter button regardless of whether or not it has an actual focus lock so if you have it set to priority for af then that means it will not take a photo unless the camera has obtained a focus lock if you wanted to always take the photo whether or not you actually have a solid focus lock then you would want to set that to release instead of af release means shutter release has priority here over focus and it's always going to take that photo when you press the shutter button barring other problems that might be causing it to stop the last option is balanced emphasis that's auto mode the camera decides if it should prioritize focus or if it should prioritize releasing the shutter for you and i don't like when the camera decides for me i prefer to have a focus lock so i set mine to af now you notice that this is for afs that's single shot focus where you press the shutter button halfway down to get a focus lock you can also tell it how to behave when you're using continuous focus mode and you'll notice that i have my continuous priority set to release because when you're shooting continuous generally speaking you're shooting moving subjects and your focus may not always be dead on accurate but for me it's important to get that photo regardless so in that case i prioritize the release because i would rather have the camera take the photo than not take the photo now we're going to move over to the next menu page and we're going to take a look at the center lock on af this is another tracking option and it works similar to how that lock-on af gobbledygook one worked but this one activates a little bit of a different way so what you have to do is you have to come into this option and you have to turn it on even though it says it's on you have to turn it on to tell the camera that you want to use this function so we're going to go in there and we're going to hit on and when you do you'll see it says tracks nearest subject to screen center so what you would do is you would center your subject on the screen and you would obtain a focus lock and then the camera will track that subject as it moves throughout the scene now the next thing i want to show you is the face and eye autofocus setting sony has fabulous face and eye detection and it's worth using this but it's not necessarily worth having this on all the time if you don't always shoot portraits and people the camera actually has it turned on by default but what i like to do is set this option to one of the cameras custom buttons so instead of going into the menu to turn this option on or off i can just turn it on or off with the press of a button on the back of the camera so i'm going to show you how to program that button what we're going to do is move over to camera page 2 and then we're going to move to page i think it's six or seven of this sub section and what we're looking for is this right here it's page eight we're looking for custom keys so you have custom keys for photos custom keys for video and custom keys for playback we are looking at custom key for photo and if you press that you have a number of different custom keyboard options and you'll see that custom button 4 i already have set to face and i priority with autofocus so what you would do is you would select the one that you want to change and custom button 4 is the trash button down here that you just hit the center button on the back of the camera to go in there and then what you do is you go through the menus until you find the particular option you want to use in this case af2 is the page that has the face and eye priority option on so with that locked in all you got to do is press this button on the back of the camera it brings this option up and you can turn it on and now face and eye detect is turned on for me and when i'm done shooting my subjects i press the trash button again and i can turn it off and it is often it's not going to interfere with my focusing so that's the sony a7iii autofocus system there's a lot going on here which is why i wanted to explain all the different options that you have if you have questions let me know down in the comments if you want to do the youtube to help me out that'd be great like subscribe whatever but make sure you take some damn photos

Channel: Spyros Heniadis

Views: 43,266

Keywords: Sony A7III Auto Focus Guide, sony a7iii autofocus modes, sony a7iii autofocus settings, sony a7iii af settings, sony a7iii autofocus photography, sony a7iii autofocus, sony a7iii af, sony a7iii user manual, spyros heniadis, sony a7iii beginners guide

Id: BnbGV0qI5zc

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021