From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts.

Continuous or one-shot autofocus?

Continuous or one-shot autofocus?

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Continuous or one-shot autofocus?

“

- Autofocus can obviously be a tremendously helpful tool in photography. And there are actually two key autofocus modes, what's typically referred to as one-shot autofocus versus continuous autofocus. And the basic idea is, do you want the camera to be focusing, constantly? With a moving subject continuous autofocus is actually very important. As a subject, maybe a bird is flying through the sky, getting closer or further away. You want to make sure that the focus is tracking that moving subject. If you're photographing some flowers here, for example, I might want to focus on a particular flower and then recompose to adjust the framing for the scene with the camera and that would mean that I don't want the focus to change. So I set my focus on one flower, and then as I pivot the camera, I don't want the focus to change to somewhere else. That would be a one-shot autofocus. And so with static subjects where you want…

Contents