Double poll! How do you focus?

That’s the same way I’ve used the OVF on the D3500, but that was much smaller than the EVF on the Z5 ii. I wonder if I could do something about the thickness of the rubber eye-piece… Ideally find a thinner replacement

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I have no problems with my glasses on both the X-T3 and the X100V

I mean I can as well, but if I use the full-width EVF display size, I have to press really hard against the viewfinder (way beyond comfort) to see the whole frame

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Yeah, I have to do that as well, although my frames allow to do this without any discomfort thankfully.

Glasses can be a real pain in the ass, and they’re becoming more so for me. Now that I’ve started to get age-related presbyopia, I now need a second pair of glasses for reading / close work. But those are unsuitable for distance viewing, so I’m constantly needing two pairs of glasses. This is obviously a problem for photography because I need the “regular” glasses for walking around and finding compositions, but then I need the reading glasses for optimal use of the camera.

Yes, I know progressives are an option, but they’re very expensive in my prescription and apparently they take several months for you to get used to them. I was put off when I saw how I would need to tilt my head slightly up for computer work, and that’s a problem for my job and the current state of my neck vertebrae!

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I presume my use-case was not envisioned fully in poll. As focusing manually, i use zone focusing, incorporating aperture and depth of field. For urban and architecture this is the most efficient i would say.

Why do you need to zone focus architecture?

Lots of people talking about glasses and viewfinders in here. I think issues may be very camera specific.

My wife’s camera (an entry-level Olympus) has much less eye relief than mine, and is noticeably more challenging to use with glasses. I hardly notice with mine, other than I smudge my glasses a lot, ha.

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This was discussed only recently. My 2 currency units…

For those of us who can’t or won’t use multifocal, old-fashioned bifocal lenses are available, They work fine for me.

Camera procedure:

LCD: just look at it through the “reading” part of the bifocal lens.

EVF: I push the glasses up onto my forehead and look, bare-eyed, into the adjusted viewfinder. It is easier and quicker to do than describe and quickly becomes a habit. One proviso: not all frames will do this hinge on the ear thing. Take your camera when buying new frames.

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I wonder what those are like, I’ve only experienced the “progressives.” While I’ve gotten used to them, I’ve never really enjoyed them.

I don’t have the option of separate reading glasses at work. If I need to read a chart, I still need to be able to see across the cockpit or out the window. Ironically, the things closest to my face that I need to see are directly above my head, so progressive lenses don’t help without a very sharp bend of the kneck… I’m not sure my passengers would be comfortable knowing details like that, heh. Nothing important up there … pressurization, fuel, electrical power, things like that…

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I’m “lucky” with my vision in that I don’t need close-up lenses, I can just look over or take off my glasses.

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When you first wear them, the step is disconcerting, but one quickly gets used to it.

Sounds like you are a pilot. I have no such experience so can’t relate. But I have heard of trifocal glasses. Heard of them: no idea if anyone makes them or how they are usually configured.

I’m guessing, distance, mid, near. I suppose varifocal put that out of business.

Maybe near, distance, near might be an option. If they can even still be made.

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The business where I have my eye exams has in their notes that I’m both a pilot and a photographer, meaning that when it comes to glasses I’m going to be very particular and difficult to please. :rofl:

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It depends. I have a Canon DSLR, BTW.

Landscape on a tripod? Manual with focus peaking on, 10x zoom on live view LCD

Focus stacking on a tripod? AF on the live view LCD, full image

Handheld? AF, multi-point

My 50mm Ricoh? Manual, of course! :slight_smile:

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I’m among the “auto - traditional” crowd, using narrow single-point focusing, though with people photography I often activate eye recognition.

However, as cameras over some decades have gotten steadily more advanced multi-point modes, I’ve begun to wonder if I do miss out on something here …

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AF improvements over the past couple of decades come from three main sources:

  1. How fast the camera body can determine the focus distance, given the focus target. Premium DSLRs nailed this early, but now it trickled down to basically all cameras with PDAF.

  2. How fast it can get the lens there. When required by optical design (eg fast tele lenses), modern lenses have multiple moving elements that drive focus, with advanced motors that move fast.

  3. What to focus on. Cameras from 10 years ago nailed eye and face recognition, but it did not stop there. Sensors from the past 5 years or so read out a reduced resolution image at 120 frame/s, sports cameras even faster. This is then processed by a dedicated unit, trained with machine learning. (This is the part that gives headaches to engineers about heat dissipation.) This technology got very good now, especially for Canon and Sony, but others are doing OK too, it’s a difference between a 90% and a 99% keeper rate.

I would say that it depends on whether you use very narrow DoF and how fast your subjects move. ML-based AF opened up kinds of sports/action photography impossible before, but for the rest of the genres, it is just “nice to have”, not essential.

A theater I like to go to in Budapest has photographs of all of its actors, past and current, in the foyer, going back to the 1960s. All of them are B&W, many shot on the stage, presumably during a dress rehearsal, in low light. I like looking at them and tell myself that if photographers with the equipment from those days could nail these shots I have no excuse for GAS.

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Yeah, with Expeed7 Nikon basically caught up and even on the 24MP models with 273 focus points (in contrast to Canon’s 2000+) the eye-AF is still very good. I want to try the eye-AF for fast scenes where I could utilize tracking, sadly I haven’t had the chance to test it out too much yet…

There’s eye tracking even in AF-S, which means that for static portraits you can focus on composition while offloading the focus point selection to the camera. As you said, it’s a nice to have rather than necessity, especially for me.

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