D300 3D tracking

I just had a chance this afternoon to play around with the D300's AF system, and

the big news for those moving up from the D200 et al will be the 3D tracking

feature (a3 in the menu) and the noticeably more snappy AF. Compared to the

D200 the D300 hunts much less, it simply locks on and stays on the subject.

 

If you are battling high contrast foreground and/or background subjects, set

Focus tracking with lock-on (a4 in the menu) to Long. As long as your subject

stays inside the oval portion of the grid which defines where the AF sensors

are, the camera will nearly instantaneously change to the AF sensor that is over

the initially acquired subject. It is so effective that several times I jerked

the camera from one side of the AF sensor array to the other and within a second

the camera had reacquired the subject -- and there's no more guessing about

which AF sensor is being used, the D300 displays the active AF sensor (and only

the active AF sensor) in real time in the viewfinder. If you want to quickly

move from one subject to another one that is nearer or farther away, let go of

the shutter or AF-On button and the active AF sensor will revert back to the

originally selected sensor and you can quickly acquire another subject.

 

3D tracking takes "focus and recompose" and transforms it from a kludge to a

genuinely useful technique. I am wondering now about the D3 by comparison,

since the AF sensors are more tightly clustered in the middle.

 

For subjects that are quickly moving towards you or away from you, it is optimal

to set Focus tracking with lock-on to Off. I would advise keeping Focus

tracking with lock-on in your My Menu folder for quick access; I might not use

any other AF setting besides 3D tracking since I haven't detected any lag yet

compared to the other AF settings.

thanks Anthony, like I'm no dreaming enough about the D3.. :/

 

;)

We seem to have encountered a bug with the D300 and the Tokina 12-24/4. My son was unable to autofocus with that lens on the D300 yesterday; but he fiddled with the menu and got it working again. My theory is that there is an intermittent failure caused by firmware incompatibility between that lens' CPU chip and the camera's Matrix metering which is used by its AF tracking.

I find the 3D tracking only works well when there's good subject separation. It worked

excellent for tennis but that's bright white shirts and a distant dark green fence/wall

background. It worked fairly well at a football (soccer) game, but occasionally picking up the

wrong player. It was terrible trying to track a bird in flight against a cluttered background. It

may work better for birds separated against the sky, not tried that yet.

 

I'm really curious how 3D tracking relates realistically to regular 51 pt dynamic area AF and

AF lock on setting. Need to shoot more action...

the whole 3D tracking system does seem a little over-automated, sending the AF sensor

dancing all over the frame. at times it seems to have a mind of its own. terrible in any static

situation, wandering aimlessly through the frame focusing on everything but your subject.

Hi Chris,

 

For birds in flight I found that the Auto-area AF mode worked great, catching birds flying overhead of me that my D200 consistently missed.

Auto-area AF... yikes, the first time i used that on my d200 was the last time and i just

forgot it even existed. prob worth a try on the d300. i suspect, like the 3D tracking, it would

only work on well separated subjects.