Getting flight photos in focus (1 Viewer)

[tom baxter]

I am shooting the cannon eos7d with a 400 fixed lens. I am inexperienced with photography but I have been practicing and learning for about a year. I am looking for pointers on how to improve the sharpness of my photos, especially in-flight shots. I find that shooting with only a single focal point engaged allows my auto-focus to pick up birds better, but setting my focal points to an automatic range typically produces sharper images. Sometimes though, when it is set to all 19 focal points I cannot even pick up birds with the auto-focus at all. This almost never happens with a single focal point. I apologize for my lack of vocabulary when it comes to photography. Can anyone offer me any good resources or pointers?

 

[Farnboro John]

I am shooting the cannon eos7d with a 400 fixed lens. I am inexperienced with photography but I have been practicing and learning for about a year. I am looking for pointers on how to improve the sharpness of my photos, especially in-flight shots. I find that shooting with only a single focal point engaged allows my auto-focus to pick up birds better, but setting my focal points to an automatic range typically produces sharper images. Sometimes though, when it is set to all 19 focal points I cannot even pick up birds with the auto-focus at all. This almost never happens with a single focal point. I apologize for my lack of vocabulary when it comes to photography. Can anyone offer me any good resources or pointers?

You might want to enable the single point expansion autofocus mode of your camera. For some unimaginable reason the camera comes out with it disabled.

Roughly speaking the camera uses the centre point to pick up on a bird but if it drifts from the centre of the frame then the camera enables other AF points in the direction of the drift.

You will find it in Menu C.FnIII: Autofocus/Drive, please don't ask me to remember the button presses to enable it (the bottom left symbol with the centre point and four around it).

John

 

[Roy C]

Another option is to use Zone AF which has a cluster of 9 AF points BUT you do need to set the AI servo sensitivity to fast if using this option as I found it passes from 1 point to another a lot quicker. Failing that single point expansion is the other alternative for flyers as John has said - either way you need to make sure you have an adequate shutter speed - I would suggest 1/1600 sec as a starting point but faster still if the light allows.

 

[tom baxter]

Great, thank you guys. I will attempt to decipher this advice, I am not the best with the camera lingo but I trust that I can figure it out. I appreciate your time responding to me!

 

[Roy C]

If you have the Canon 400/5.6 lens Tom, then an easy way the get good flight shots with the 7D is to set Tv mode and auto ISO - just dial-in say 1/1600 sec and shoot away in either single point expansion or Zone AF- the only thing to worry about it the metering but that's a whole new topic. When you use Auto ISO like this it will almost always open the lens right up wide (f5.6) which is fine for the 400/5.6 as it is pin sharp wide open.

 

[tom baxter]

Thank you, I figured out how to enable the Single Point expansion mode, and I already see an excellent improvement. Now I just need a good weather day when I have off work so I can really play around with the new knowledge you all have provided. I will experiment with Tv mode as well Roy.