From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

How many autofocus points?

From the course: Photo Gear Weekly

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How many autofocus points?

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- Today's digital cameras have sophisticated auto focus systems and thank goodness because that makes it very easy to achieve accurate focus even under challenging circumstances, but one of the questions I get a lot from photographers is how many of the available auto focus points should they make available? You can have dozens of auto focus points within the frame, which means that either camera's able to choose among lots of those options or that you can navigate among those options. So why would you ever want to use fewer than the maximum number of available auto focus points? Well it depends on the circumstance. So first off, let's take a look at the options on this particular camera. You'll see that for my selectable auto focus points, I can choose between 65 auto focus points, 21 auto focus points, or just nine points. And even just looking at the array of auto focus points you can get a sense of the potential advantages of one versus the other. With lots of auto focus points, we can be more granular in our selection of where we want the camera to focus or the camera can be more granular when it's choosing where to focus within the frame because those auto focus points, when there are more of them, are not spaced all that far apart and so we can have a very subtle difference between focusing in one part of the frame, or one part of our subject, versus another. In other cases though I find that actually creates more work and not necessarily much of a benefit. When I'm tracking a subject that's flying through the sky, for example, maybe a bird in flight, having 65 auto focus points to choose from can make my work a little bit more challenging. Instead I'll tend to use fewer auto focus points so that I can more quickly navigate to the point I want. I'll then use that auto focus point within the viewfinder as my reference, essentially as the target for where I want to put that bird in the frame in this example. And so more is not necessarily better. Sometimes simplifying the number of auto focus points that is available will help to streamline your workflow as a photographer. So, especially when you're going to let the camera choose an auto focus point and you have a complex scene you might want more auto focus points, but to help reduce your overall workload and to streamline your workflow, you might find that it's easier from time to time to reduce the number of auto focus points that are available.

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