Pretty Red Head

[cyberlord]

A little soft as the feeder was swinging around pretty good. I might try tying the bottom of the feeder to an adjacent 4x4 and see if that helps.

Tim

[paulnj]

Ah so you have housefinches at your feeder too. It looks as if you are shooting at like f11 and focusing behind the bird on the feeder itself on the first and last?

[cyberlord]

The swinging feeder made it hard to get a decent focus. I tried manual on a couple but my eyesight is terrible these days.

Yes, I agree the seed itself seems to be more in focus than the bird.

I'll have to work on a focusing scheme for this situation.

I think I have the same problem with my ground shots, I think the ground gets focused more than the object I'm shooting. I have segment focus on and its supposed to focus on the closest object to the camera, but I think it's fooled by the ground a lot too.

I had very good luck with that focus method at the Adventure Race today as the subjects were bigger and further from other objects so the focus wasn't confused. I'll be posting a few in the next couple days, but right now I have 600 shots to process and burn to CD before Monday. Yes 600 shots after I lost a couple hundred in a memory card transfer that went sour.

Wish me luck,

Tim

[paulnj]

Well I know canon and nikon pretty well, so I don't know your cameras modes.

I do know my Canon has closest subject priority which is great for flight shots especially and birds in the open.Also it has AI(predictive continuous AF) Which I can't stand to use in alot of cases when the subject is small in the frame or cluttered.

My suggestion is to use a single shot mode rhat focuses on which ever sensor you designate. That to me is the best mode for somewhat static subjects. Sounds to me like segment activates every sensor and which ever one has the closest subject wins ;) Camera can be fooled by low contrast , as I found out the hard way while trying to get closeups of a gartersnake in leaf debris in the woods.