April | 2018 | Closer

After chatting with my past photography tutor and looking at many YouTube clips I have now started to get my head around the different focus settings. You don’t have to wade through the menu it’s simply controlled by pressing the AF M focus button on the side of the camera. This also allows you to view what area mode and focus setting you are currently shooting in. You manipulate the main command dial to set the focus mode and the sub command dial to set the focus area……..Eureka

Upon till now I had been using the AFS area but I didn’t realise that I had the focus set on auto as I wasn’t totally au fait with this.

During a recent trip to the Netherlands with my daughter’s football team (Richmond Rovers) I experimented with some of the area and focus modes and a couple of the automatic scene modes. This proved to be a useful learning tool.

I took action shots first using the AFC and single setting and then later with the sports scene setting. The shots which featured individual player shots worked well with the AFC . Those specifically featuring multiple movement and players were more effective using the sports setting. This is automatically set on AFA d51 so focuses on a larger area and accounts for fast movement.In contrast the AFC single setting worked well capturing individual players but I should have used a different focus mode.

Also I used the quick night scene setting to capture the lights of the oil refinery , which gave the illusion of a city. However I wasn’t pleased with the results and noticed that the automatic setting for this is AFA auto. This is another area I need to research.

‘Oh well’ as they say a “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.” but for now here are a couple of photographs from the Netherlands.