P#8 Q6E: Using a Different Button to Auto Focus on Your Digital Camera

A useful technique involving auto focus for your digital camera

Roy Toft: If you have your auto focus on your shutter button, that means every time you push the shutter button, you have to recompose and put your auto focus square on the eye of the animal to keep a sharp picture, and recompose.

Doing the custom function I'm describing offers you the ability to auto focus one time, and now you can change your composition, do multiple shots, and never have to go back and auto focus again because you just pushed the shutter button.

Now you're locked in a non auto focus position. It also allows you to be in a full servo mode continuously.

What that means is you never have to lock in a single servo mode which most of us use -- that's how we shoot because we want to recompose.

In a full servo mode, that's where you're actively auto-focusing all the time when it's activated.

Let me give you an example. If you're photographing a coyote, and it's sitting there howling, and you're in full servo and you have your auto focus on your back button so you put your little square on the coyote's head, you hit your thumb. That auto focuses.

Now you recompose so you have the coyote in one third of your frame and a nice background. You can shoot multiple pictures with your shutter. You just take multiple pictures; it's never going to auto focus again. The coyote isn't moving, you're not moving, so you don't need to auto focus every picture.

Now that coyote stands up and starts to walk directly towards you. You're in a full servo mode so now you can put the square, your auto focus square, right on the head of that coyote, press your thumb down on that new auto focus button, keep it pressed down, and your camera will continually auto focus as he's walking toward you and you just shoot away.

Now you get all the functionality of auto focus, the full servo, the single shot because you can stop and lock it by not having your thumb on this button, and you get the versatility of using auto focus when it's appropriate, and not using it when it's going to mess with you.

That's my biggest secret. Everybody loves this technique.

It might seem a little strange at the beginning. I would encourage people to try to find this custom function and give it a try. It takes a little bit of physical memory, it takes practice.

You don't want to go right in the field with this new technique, because you're going to be expecting that auto focus will be on your shutter button as it always has been. So when you're not used to it, you're going to wonder, "Why isn't it focusing, why isn't it focusing?" when you press the shutter button.

It's because you've switched the functionality to be on a different button.

Once people get used to it though, they always tell me that's the favorite technical tip that I gave them, and they love it. They can never go back to doing it the old way.

When someone hands me their camera that is set the "normal" way with their auto focus on their shutter button, it drives me crazy because I'm ready to take the photo but then the camera wants to override and auto focus somewhere. It drives me crazy.

In conclusion

One of Roy Toft's biggest secrets is to switch the auto focus away from the shutter button on your digital camera.

He recommends you do this so that you can auto focus without the camera overriding you when you recompose and push the shutter button. It's helpful when taking wildlife -- and just about any other -- photographs. But don't forget you've done this!