Earlier I mentioned having pretty egregious autofocus issues with the Canon 7D and the Tamron 150-600 lens, and sat down to see if I could improve things. My efforts were quite successful, so I’m going to go over what I did in the hopes that someone else may benefit from this. Virtually all of these will apply to any DSLR camera, with perhaps minor variations.
Clean the contacts.
I was out on two photo excursions earlier this week, and the first made me distinctly aware that something was wrong with my autofocus. Well, mine was all right, but the camera’s was off noticeably, for damn near every frame. I provide some examples:
This is full-frame, and while it’s taken at 600mm, the osprey (Pandion haliaetus) wasn’t that far away –
That’s not how the line actually goes, but it services anyway. I’ve had these photos, and this subject, for nearly two weeks now, with nary a post in there, and just didn’t do a damn thing with them. Nor did Doc Brown show up to save me.
Now, there is a little backstory, but let’s start at the beginning. I went down to Jordan Lake while the temperature was nice just
I am presently deep within an investigation: what exactly is causing the autofocus on the Tamron 150-600 to be so undependable? Another outing chasing birds on Jordan Lake produced far too many images where focus wasn’t anywhere near where it was supposed to be, and I had made it a point to try and trip the shutter only when it seemed locked on. At times it
While I mentioned this before, people might still be surprised to know how often I turn the autofocus off when shooting pics. There are a couple of reasons for that. Mostly, it’s when I’m trying something like catching birds in midair, where they represent too small a target for the autofocus area within the camera to obtain enough contrast, so the focus winds the entire