Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Focus test with the Nikon D4

Today I did a test of the focusing ability of the new Nikon D4 camera.  In the past, I always had difficulty with auto-focus on the Nikon 105mm macro lens.  In even moderately difficult lighting situations, it would hunt for focus, racking in an out so much that I would finally give up and either switch it to manual focus or change lenses altogether.  In today's test, I created a difficult focusing situation for the D4 by, first, mounting the 105 macro on it, and, second, by setting up an extreme back-lit situation where I was shooting directly into a tungsten light. To make matters even tougher, I shot the lens with the aperture wide open. This would be difficult for any lens, but I knew the 105mm would have the most trouble.  The camera behaved beautifully. It never hunted for focus once, and all of over 250 frames were sharply focused on the eyes.  Quite honestly, I have never had a camera perform so perfectly in a situation like this.

For this shot I put one of the Nikon's 51 pinpoint focus spots on the left eye.  You can see the tungsten lamp shining in from the left side.  This is an extremely difficult auto-focus situation for a camera/lens combo to handle.  I chose the Nikkor 105mm micro lens because I knew it would have difficulty focusing.  The Nikon D4 nailed the exposure and the focus in this situation for over 250 frames. 

No comments:

Post a Comment