Canon R5 - setting the focus method

I hear people already. If you didn't want all that amazing focus stuff, why did you buy that R5 camera? Indeed, it is wonderful to have all that, but most of it is useful to an action shooter. It just gets in my way and (dare I say it) even does the wrong thing for macro shots.

I just want a single central focus point! Period. No more discussion.

With a single central focus point, I can point to an object and tell the camera "focus here" and be in control.

My camera is currently in some too smart focus setup where it decides where to focus. I try to focus on a wildflower and the camera thinks that the right thing is to focus on the ground behind it. I try to focus on a large flat circuit board, and the camera thinks that the right thing is to focus on some wires that stick up toward the camera. Smart is good, but only when it works.

I had my Canon 5D set up to just have the focus point locked to the center and was quite happy. A quick fix for now is that I have learned that I can tap the screen on the place I would like it to focus and it does so pretty well. I'll have to use this and gain more experience with it. It may solve all of my problems. I will note that touching the screen and trying to drag does nothing useful. A quick "tap" or touch does the trick.

Someday I'll dig deep into all the various focus settings. Here is a forum discussion that has many suggestions:

• How to lock focus point

Focus modes and methods

We have focus modes -- they tell the camera when to focus.
We have focus methods -- this tells the camera where to focus.

There are essentially two modes - one shot and servo. I select "one shot"

You get 8 focus methods to choose from:

• Face + tracking
• Spot AF (smallest box on screen, but see below)
• 1 point AF (twice as bit as spot, but more robust)
• expand AF area
• expand AF area - around
• zone AF
• large zone AF - vertical
• large zone AF - horizontal

(I would call "method" area selection, but we go with the language Canon uses.

OK, OK -- I hear you already, "great, but how do I select which one". You can go into the menus and do it, but there is a short cut:

Press the button at the top right of the back of the camera -- just right of the * button. It has a funny box with + in the middle of it to mark it. When you do this, a menu appears at the bottom of the screen -- for about 4 seconds.

While the menu is up, press the M-Fn button up near the shutter button to cycle between methods.
Who would know or guess this stuff?

Spot is smaller than "1 point", which is counterintuitive, but OK. It is about 3.5 percent of screen area, while 1 point is about 7.
However the tiny "spot" can have trouble in low light or with grossly out of focus images, so "1 point" may be a better choice.

Moving the focus spot around

The easiest way is to use the touch screen (this is probably how it gets moved to weird unexpected places). This way of moving the spot can be enabled/disabled in some menu somewhere.

• Video - 5 ways to move the autofocus poiht

• The multi controller (push it to recenter)
• The touch screen
• The dials (one is horizontal, one is vertical)
• touch screen drag
• eye control

Bonus thoughts

I found this comment (by a fellow who shoots concerts) interesting:

I can trust the face/eye detection the majority of the time, but I also use back button focus with face/eye detect on one button and manual point selection on another, so I get the best of both options. So, when the eye/face detect does get it wrong which happens about 10% of the time, I can fall back to the point selection instead without missing a beat.

Maybe I can (and should) configure the AF-on button to do the exact same thing as the * button. Maybe. Or I can investigate doing as per the above and have different buttons for different focus methods.

When I do use the AF-ON button the camera will hunt around, sprinkle green boxes on some object it likes (but I usually don't) and focus there.