Broom plants - what went wrong

What went wrong with these? I had autofocus on - and considering the Canon 90 can easily auto focus on birds it should be ok with stationary plants.
However it doesn't look quite goodright, I had aperture f 10

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2nju​JXv

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2njx​3MB

From my experience the autofocus didn't work properly in the first photo, because there was not enough contrast (too much green). The second photo is much better. A landscape photo is maybe better with Manual focus. And I've the 60mm macro lens too and find out that it is not really suited for landscapes.
But these are my experiences, maybe others have an idea too.

What auto focus *points* did you have enabled? Using one of the "zone" options (vs using a single point) can yield different results. My experience is that it's usually not that auto focus didn't work, but it didn't focus on the thing that I wanted.

With Canon, the auto point selection will look for a blend of high contrast and close-ness. The over hanging leaves at the top of the frame (for example) would be a good candidate for the camera to choose.

dasmith232 wrote in post #19376474
What auto focus *points* did you have enabled? Using one of the "zone" options (vs using a single point) can yield different results. My experience is that it's usually not that auto focus didn't work, but it didn't focus on the thing that I wanted.

With Canon, the auto point selection will look for a blend of high contrast and close-ness. The over hanging leaves at the top of the frame (for example) would be a good candidate for the camera to choose.

I had the zone enabled see

Lyn2011 wrote in post #19376460
From my experience the autofocus didn't work properly in the first photo, because there was not enough contrast (too much green). The second photo is much better. A landscape photo is maybe better with Manual focus. And I've the 60mm macro lens too and find out that it is not really suited for landscapes.
But these are my experiences, maybe others have an idea too.

Thanks for that.

It's hard to tell without seeing the originals or at least, 100% crops of the subject area, but they don't look all that bad. A lot depends on what you were trying to achieve. If you want it to pop a bit, you can do so in post by bumping up the saturation, contrast, then apply some sharpening.

Besides the important points that Lyn2011 listed, f/100 or 125 is often too slow for clarity. Tripod, monopod, braced, or handheld? And if it was windy, foliage was moving around. And broom plants are so spread out that they're basically hemispherical, meaning that different areas of the visible surface will be various distances from you.

More important that the AF points chosen is whether or not you're using One Shot or Servo. For static subjects, One Shot is going to be your most accurate because it "locks" the focus point and stops hunting/checking once focus is acquired. Servo just sort of pauses, but continues to jockey the lens group looking for corrections; this can cause missed focus fairly easily in static subjects and is exacerbated by the lack of contrast noted above and your distance. OhLook's comment on wind can also make this worse; as it really doesn't take much of a breeze at ALL for something as fine of detail as Scotch Broom to show motion blur at all from it.

Snydremark wrote in post #19376589
OhLook's comment on wind can also make this worse

Oh, dear. All too often, my comments have that effect.

OhLook wrote in post #19376628
Oh, dear. All too often, my comments have that effect.

Hahahaha

davholla wrote in post #19376500
I had the zone enabled see

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I don't know if this has at all changed over the years, but the AF Point display shows only WHICH of the AF points were used for determination of focus, but it does NOT show what point(s) in the scene actually were the ones that were located at the AF point at time of focus.
That is, if I select the right focus point to use for focus which is located on the letter X of 'School Xing' sign, but after I focus I then re-frame so that the entire sign is located at the left half of the frame, the right AF point will be displayed red but it could be superimposed over nothing in the photo (because the sign is at the left of the photo)

I *think* you don't see any red boxes in that case. I do a fair amount of BBF and recompose for sports and I have plenty of pics with no red boxes because AF was not active at that time.