I had the luck of getting a ticket to the uk.shooters Halloween Meet in London on 20th October this year. Me and one hundred and ninety nine other photographers (I'm assuming they all attended) descended on London's Leake Street tunnel to shoot a plethora of models who had all been made up by professional make-up artists.
Now, previously when I've shot portraits, I've relied on the G9's face-detect auto-focus to acquire perfect focus on the eyes. This has worked very well in the past, and I've had little reason to doubt the capability of the body as a result.
But this shoot was different. Not only was the available light low (and I mean really low), but many of the models had make-up the skewed the human face. Or hair that covered large chunks of the face.
Ordinarily, if I notice something going wrong, then I'll try to work out what is going wrong, and above all, why it is going wrong.
In this case, the camera was struggling to find a face in the composition. What Panasonic cameras do when they fail to find focus is to set the lens to infinity, or thereabouts. This is rarely ideal, as the lenses usually go beyond infinity - which means a soft image. Both the Panasonic Leica f/1.4 25mm and Panasonic Lumix f/1.7 42.5mm suffered from this.
So what did I try? First of all, since I was in continuous AF, I tried setting a different tracking setting. This made no difference whatsoever, and I'll tell you why - because the subjects weren't moving enough in any axis to make tracking necessary. Frankly, any of the tracking settings should have worked.
I then switch from continuous AF to single AF. This didn't make a difference either. The camera was failing to find the initial focus, so it didn't really matter what auto-focus mode it was in.
I have since worked out what my error was - having the focus-assist light switched off.
This is a bright orange beam of light that comes on in low-light situations to allow the contrast-detect auto-focus system something to lock on to. And this is something I never switch off.
Why was it off? Because I had set the camera up as a "silent" shooter for a surreptitious shot in the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's cathedral weeks before. I hadn't noticed there because the main lenses I was shooting with with the Voigtlander f/0.95 17.5mm and Samyang f/3.5 7.5mm fisheye - both of which are fully manual lenses.
I learnt three lessons from this:
Ultimately, I was saved on a number of occasions by the aforementioned Voigtlander. Because it is fully manual, and my subjects weren't moving too much, I could set the aperture to f/1.2 (for that extra bit of sharpness) and just shoot.
Now, previously when I've shot portraits, I've relied on the G9's face-detect auto-focus to acquire perfect focus on the eyes. This has worked very well in the past, and I've had little reason to doubt the capability of the body as a result.
But this shoot was different. Not only was the available light low (and I mean really low), but many of the models had make-up the skewed the human face. Or hair that covered large chunks of the face.
Ordinarily, if I notice something going wrong, then I'll try to work out what is going wrong, and above all, why it is going wrong.
In this case, the camera was struggling to find a face in the composition. What Panasonic cameras do when they fail to find focus is to set the lens to infinity, or thereabouts. This is rarely ideal, as the lenses usually go beyond infinity - which means a soft image. Both the Panasonic Leica f/1.4 25mm and Panasonic Lumix f/1.7 42.5mm suffered from this.
So what did I try? First of all, since I was in continuous AF, I tried setting a different tracking setting. This made no difference whatsoever, and I'll tell you why - because the subjects weren't moving enough in any axis to make tracking necessary. Frankly, any of the tracking settings should have worked.
I then switch from continuous AF to single AF. This didn't make a difference either. The camera was failing to find the initial focus, so it didn't really matter what auto-focus mode it was in.
I have since worked out what my error was - having the focus-assist light switched off.
This is a bright orange beam of light that comes on in low-light situations to allow the contrast-detect auto-focus system something to lock on to. And this is something I never switch off.
Why was it off? Because I had set the camera up as a "silent" shooter for a surreptitious shot in the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's cathedral weeks before. I hadn't noticed there because the main lenses I was shooting with with the Voigtlander f/0.95 17.5mm and Samyang f/3.5 7.5mm fisheye - both of which are fully manual lenses.
I learnt three lessons from this:
- Check all settings on your camera before a shoot, extreme or otherwise. Usually, I'll do the ISO/WB/exposure-comp check to make sure they're all auto or set to zero. But ensure that burst-settings are where they need to be; focus-zones are set-up for the situation; and other ancillary settings are ticked.
- If the settings aren't working, keeping "debugging" - I gave up way too early, fearing that I'd be missing shots. Instead, I returned home with 2000+ shots, many of which were unusually soft.
- You're using Micro Four Thirds, whose low-light performance isn't ideal. Bring some light! I really should have had a speedlight with me (I own a Metz 44-AF2, which stupidly rarely travels with me.)
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