SCoombs • Contributing Member • Posts: 924
Bad Z-system Advice
6 days ago
14
This evening as my kids played in the backyard I took a few photos just to mess around a bit as I compare a couple of lenses. As I took the shots, it occurred to me just how differently (and more effectively) I was using my Z8 in that situation from how I'd have done it when I first got my Z7ii years ago and I started thinking about some of the bad advice about using the Z system that had been so ubiquitous for a long while.
The only shot I really put much effort in to trying to make anything decent of is my son on the swing. He has only recently reached a point where he can actually use a regular swing and tonight every time I pushed him he offered a great laugh, and so I decided to try to catch it. Unfortunately, by this time it was getting dark (it was a lot darker than this photo makes it look), causing not only high ISO but also poses a more challenging condition for the AF.
The first thing I did was turn him around to face the light direction - the sun set directly behind me as I took this photo - but I found that the subject detection ("eye-AF") just couldn't quite keep up with the speed of his rapid back and forth movement directly towards/away from the camera in this light. This didn't surprise me as I have found the eye-AF to lose a little something as the light drops and can sometimes lag a smidge behind movement in these conditions so that the plane of focus is just behind where it needs to be.
My solution was to use dynamic area medium and manually track his face. This worked well and I got the shot, but as I did it I sort of chuckled a bit thinking of how often I used to see people on forums and personalities on Youtube warn against using the dynamic area modes. These were "legacy modes," you'd commonly see, and the use of them was sometimes even the subject of a scolding that people would get when asking for help with the new Z-system AF.
Of course, back then there were a lot of complaints about the AF on the Z6 and Z7, but there were equally as many people who said that the AF worked great but that it wasn't like a DSLR and so people had to learn to use the new system. It was extremely common to see complaints about action AF met with responses that insisted people with these difficulties simply hadn't learned how to use the Z system and were still thinking like they did in the DSLR days, and still using the "legacy modes." People would say that modes like dynamic area only existed as holdovers from the old DSLR system. It was very believable, too, because some of the most reliable and trustworthy personalities were on record saying the same thing. I certainly bought into the idea and didn't use the dynamic area modes for years.
Today in 2024, they are increasingly among my most-used modes, and what's more I find a lot of professionals out there seem to report using the dynamic area modes as well. More and more Youtube personalities also talk about these modes as being their go-to for various situations. In a situation like with this photo of my son, I think they may be the best option. I suppose I could have aimed for a wide-area box with the subject detection turned off, but I like the extra little layer of control I have with dynamic area. With wide area I can choose between having a box that is perhaps just a tad too large so that it grabs something I don't want due to closest subject priority, or I can set a small custom box which is ultimately as demanding as single point in terms of manual tracking precision. With the dynamic area box, I cantry to grab focus on the eye but have a little margin of error for if I don't track as well. I don't think of these as legacy modes any longer, but as modes which do a specific thing that I frequently want to do.
It's pretty amazing to think how widely these were dismissed and, frankly, how much better success I'd have had with the Z system over the years had I ignored this at-the-time pretty ubiquitous advice and used dynamic area.
As the evening wore on, it started to get darker and my kids moved from swings to the slide. I initially tried some shots like this with subject detection again, but it was really just giving me out of focus throwaways. I then tried dynamic area, but for some reason I was having a harder time keeping the focus on their faces even with the extra wiggle room provided by helper points. I think it just comes down to their being a lot more unpredictable with their movements when they were doing this. I did manage to get one good (or at least in focus) shot using the large dynamic area mode:
However, I soon found easier results coming from old fashioned 3D tracking with subject detect turnedoff:
With this approach, I was able to acquire focus just as they positioned themselves at the top of the slide and then let the camera track them down the slide without as much precision required on my part. It was a bit like using subject tracking, but something about the way the system works without that extra layer of processing to identify a subject and its features and all of that just kept the focus where it needed to be that tiny fraction of a second better to give me in focus results.
I won't have as much to say about 3D tracking other than to say that it was also frequently dismissed as a "legacy mode," and I certainly understand why. For a long while I frankly wondered what value it has or what its purpose is in a camera with full area AF and subject detection. I couldn't see the difference, and indeed there isn't really a differencewhen subject tracking is turned on, in which case as far as I can see it all behaves exactly like full area AF. On the other hand, with subject detection turnedoff it's a different ball game. Now functioning according to its "dumber" roots, the system is able to track colors (if I recall correctly about how it works) without giving the subject detection system a chance to make a mistake. Don't read that as a huge knock on the subject detection system. It works well in many circ*mstances and I use it frequently, but sometimes it doesn't work and in those cases the "dumb" version of 3D tracking can be helpful!
In any case, it's pretty interesting to think back over what is now going on quite a few years with the Z system being out there and the ways people have approached it over that time. Perhaps a bit ironically, it's in the last few years as the more technologically advanced elements of system have improved that I've seen more people recognizing and extolling the strengths of its older technologies. It's also a heck of a thing for me to think of the many times I've seen users complain about struggles in different situations only to be warned further away from those features which may have been just what they needed to deal with the issue!
