A7Rii A7Sii Focusing System Training Tutorial  | How to Focus | Overview Review Tips A7r2

When we're talking about the focusing systems on the A7R II, they are highly complex. So if you are a pure beginner, I'm going to simplify this by talking about the how, the when, and the where the camera is focusing. If you simplify it like this, it is going to be a lot easier. So how do we focus? When you push the shutter button halfway down, you'll notice that in this focusing mode, box corners turn green. I have this indicator here in the bottom. That tells us the camera is focused. When we push it down all the way, it takes the picture. Pretty straightforward. So let's talk about when the camera is focusing. To access the focusing modes, we're going to push C3. You'll notice we have five different modes in here. The first, single shot AF, means that when we push the shutter button down halfway, it gets focused lock. And this is indicated when the box corners turn green. We also have a green dot in the bottom left-hand corner. Pretty straightforward. Push it down all the way. It's going to take the picture. AFC stands for auto focus continuous. And this is different than auto focus single in that it focuses over and over and over again. Great for moving subjects, kids, sports, maybe animals, cars, bicyclists, birds. You'll also notice the focus lock has green parentheses around it. If the camera moves, the focusing is also going to change. Push the shutter button down all the way. It's going to take the picture. AFA stands for auto focus automatic. And in this mode, we're giving the camera permission to make the determination whether our subject is still or whether she is moving. If I was to shoot a wedding, this is the mode I'd probably be shooting on simply because I know a bride will stop and start walking over and over many times throughout the day. And this lets the camera help me out instead of having to change which mode I'm in over and over. Manual focus is really cool on the a7R II because we have this feature called focus peaking. This is a focusing aid that allows us to see exactly where the focal plane is. Very useful for videographers because it allows us to dial in exactly where it is, even with very shallow depths of field. And then we can take the picture. I shot a lot of pictures on this camera with a very wide aperture Canon lenses adapted, the focusing systems in low light. I wasn't getting the results I wanted. I flipped it over to manual and I was able to dial it in very easily. To activate your peaking focus, you're going to come into your settings tab, peaking level. So if I wanted to change my peaking, I could change it from yellow to red. You can also go to a middle level. You can see it's kind of harder to see now, but you can see a little bit of this red pixelation in Caitlin's eyes. Very useful tool. This MF assist on page one of the settings tab. Manual focus assist, it's a zoom that essentially when we rotate the zoom ring, it is going to automatically punch in. And you can move it around with the directional pad. So we know that when we see, kind of hard to see, there's these yellow pixels in Caitlin's eyes. We know it's in focus. Push the shutter button down all the way, takes a picture. DMF stands for direct manual focus. And this is a hybrid of autofocus and manual focus. So we can use our autofocusing. We can also fine tune it and dial it in manually. So those are the autofocus modes or when the camera is focusing, whether it's a single focus or a continuous focus, or whether it's a manual focus. So we've talked about the how, we have talked about the when, and now we're going to talk about the where, which deals with the camera's focusing squares themselves. I have some preferences, but to go through all of them, and you should know all of them, we'll go through this real quick. The way we select our focusing squares is we press C2, and then we rotate our directional pad. The first one is wide. And essentially this means the camera is going to focus on the closest subject to the camera in the full field of view. Maybe a little, not a little bit on the edges, but it's picking up Caitlin. And if I get my hand in front of the camera, it's going to find my fingers. So closest subject to you. The second one is very similar to this, zone. The difference with zone is that we can kind of designate the area for the camera to look in. We can shift this around by pushing on our directional pad, left, right, up, and down. The third focusing cluster is called center. The camera is simply going to focus onto the center of the monitor. Pretty straightforward, never use it. These three are the ones that I use the most. Flexible spots, small, medium, and large. You'll notice that the square size is changing. Place where we can see it a little bit better here, on the wall. So look at the size of the square. Small, medium, and large. I like this one because it allows me to tell the camera to look in a very specific place. It is only looking there. This is going to work particularly good for sports shooting. You have a moving subject and lots of people running around. It'll allow you to position your focus specifically. So I usually go for large or medium most of the time. Expand flexible spot is going to essentially allow the camera to look into two different places. Primarily in the smaller square. Caitlin, go ahead and hold your finger up. So I can get focus lock on that. Now I'm on single focus, so it is just going to get a focus lock. But if I go to auto focus continuous, what's going to happen is, as Caitlin moves her finger around just a little bit, it is also going to search that outer box. So if you like to shoot birds in flight, for example, this might be the way to go. It is going to be very forgiving, but only in that specific area. Something else that you'll notice is that when you turn on auto focus continuous, we get these lock on zones, which is essentially very similar to the other ones we just looked at. The difference being is that as a subject moves, the camera is going to track it. So in this case, it gets sort of like this focus lock. Now, sometimes it works spectacularly well, and sometimes it doesn't work very good, but you can essentially choose different sizes to lock on. Go ahead and move around again, Caitlin. And it's going to track it as long as you're pushing your shutter button halfway down. One of the more impressive features on the a7R II is the new eye detection focusing. There's this very specific way to set it up. Make sure that the focusing area you have is wide. You have to be on the wide, and you should be on auto focus continuous. If it's not set up this way, it's not going to work the same. Now, if I push the shutter button halfway down, we have our normal focusing. It's just essentially picking up on the closest subject to me, in this case, Caitlin's face. But let's say she was moving around or changing her positions a lot, and I wanted to get a tight focus lock on her eye. If you're a portrait photographer or if you're taking pictures of people, it's very important that the eyes are in focus. I'm shooting at f4. If I was shooting at f1.4 or 1.8 or 1.2, depending on the lens I was using, it becomes a lot harder to get that very sharp focus lock. So, wide area, auto focus continuous, and the default is to push the center button of your directional pad, and we get this little box jumping on Caitlin's eye. Now, as long as I hold this down, Caitlin, if you take a few steps backwards, you're going to see that it's going to track her eye. Go ahead and move around a little bit. It is very, very good. I have tested a lot of different cameras that claim to be able to do this. Sway your head back and forth like this. By far the best I've ever seen. Go ahead and stop. So, I take a picture. I know her eyes are going to be in focus. Very impressive. There is a limit to it. You can come into your menu, go to the phase detection area. You can see how far it'll go to either side here. And so, Caitlin, go ahead and sway your head off to the one side very far, a little bit more, and it jumps to a wider view. Come back in. But that is how you do eye detection focusing. Let's talk about face detection. Super important. It's actually very good. There's many different face detection modes. We have a face registration mode I'm not going to talk about. We have a smile detection. It'll even tell you how big they're smiling, a normal, a big smile, slight smile. So, when I turn face detection on, you'll notice that we get this faint white box. Caitlin, you can go ahead and move around a little bit. And you can see that it's pretty much tracking her face wherever she goes. It's actually very good. It's very accurate. And it is going to work best on autofocus continuous. When you turn it on to autofocus single, you have to get a focus lock. Go ahead and move around a little bit. And she can move around, but the camera is not refocusing anymore. So, just make sure that if you use that, it's on AFC. The reason why this is so important is because when you start to shoot video, we flip this over to our video mode, we lose a lot of our focusing modes. So, if we come in to the camera here, you'll notice that they're all grayed out. All these modes are grayed out. We really have AFC in manual focus. So, if you're doing interviews with video mode and you might have somebody moving around, it's actually very, very good. The person can be walking around quite a bit. It breathes a little bit, but you'll be okay. I like to shoot on manual focus most of the time. So, real quick, I wanted to talk about this important switch right here. It says AF slash MF. Critically important to know what this is and how to use it because coming into this menu to change between manual and auto-focus can be a little tedious. This button, when you push it, it is going to jump to the opposite focusing mode of whatever it is you're using. So, if you're on auto-focus single and you push this, boom, now we're in manual mode and we can dial in our manual focusing. If we set this to manual focus and we push it and hold it down, now we're in auto-focus single. Push the shutter button, takes the picture. So, this is a very important little button to know and use. I know a lot of Sony Alpha users that do not know exactly what it is. So, this is the opposite focus button right here. Definitely a ton of information to keep track of. We've talked about how to focus with the camera, when the camera is focusing, where the camera is focusing. We've talked about manual focus, peaking, eye detection, face detection, how to shoot in video. I know it's a lot of information. If you go through with your camera in hand, you go through each of those steps a couple times, you're going to become very familiar with how the camera focuses and you'll be up to speed in no time. If you found this video helpful, you may be interested in my Sony A7R II crash course. I'll teach you the basics and show you how to shoot like a pro in no time. You can order it and many other great training videos from the following link.