[stoppingdown]

I feel much more comfortable with mirrorless than DSLR for a number of aspects, including focus accuracy... with an exception. Sometimes the camera just does it wrong - I mean, it really misfocuses. I'm talking of stationary objects (landscapes), so it's not a matter of tracking. I know that no system is perfect and I expect a small percentage of failures - in the end, DSLR weren't perfect either.

 

Still I'm trying to understand whether there's something I can do to improve things. Statistics are that - say - one image out of 20 is misfocused. In most cases, even though I can't say I'm clearly seeing it in the EVF (especially in the lo-res of the a6000) I have a sort of feeling about that, so I re-shoot re-focusing a number of times. During the post-processing I can confirm that when I find a subject that has been shot more than the average, it happens that the first images are misfocused. Multiple attempts improve chances of having it right, so, in the end, most of the problems are compensated and the final percentage of lost images - I mean, after the post-processing and final selection - is about 1%. Of these, a handful in a year are those that I really miss because they could have been great photos.

 

During the latest experience with the Sigma 150-600mm the percentage has been higher. There are at least three shots in a day that I'm sad about, for instance the one that you can see below.

 

Now, perhaps is the new lens, perhaps is the MC-11 adapter, perhaps is the fact that zooming in a landscape, especially in the warm hazy season, increases chances of pointing the AF sensor to an area where there is no enough contrast. But in the case below, I autofocused on the rightmost tree leaves, which seems to be dark enough to stand out of the bright background.

 

Fortunately I spotted the problem during the review of the first day, and the next days I switched to manual focusing when I perceived the problem again, and didn't experience any further loss. Still, autofocusing with the big beast is not the better experience in the world if one doesn't want to set up the tripod every time. Also, as said, the low resolution EVF of the a6000 doesn't help a lot. I won't buy the a6300 until the end of the year (perhaps) because of budget restrictions.

 

Any hint? I'm using the central sensor, in "small" mode to precisely select the area where to focus. Indeed I did a few attempts with "large", but things didn't seem to improve.

 

** NOTE: I'm still struggling with image upload - please come back later :-)

 

** Note: the whole image picture will probably look with several compression artefacts, because even misfocused it has quite a number of details and I had to lower the quality.