5D MkIII AF Point Selection

Hi All

Apologies if this has been asked before.

I typically use a single AF point to focus. Is there a function setting I can change to use the multi-controller button to continuously scroll to my desired AF Point if push and hold the controller in the desired direction? Current functionality is I can only move one AF point at a time even if I press and hold the multi-controller.

Thanks

No, that's the way it is.

There are several alternatives, though. Note that I'm thinking along the lines of the 1DX here, and although the two are very similar, they aren't identical, so there may be limitations when it comes to the 5D Mark III here.

• You can limit the number of selectable AF points. Thus it's quicker to go through them, but you can of course not select every one of them then
  
• Assuming you've not configured that away, you can select AF points by rolling top and real dials too. Since rolling is quicker than tap-tap-tap on the multicontroller, this method allows quick movements of the selected point. Drawbacks are that you have to press the AF selection button first, and that you need both dials to move in both directions.
  
• Rear dial can be set to directly select an AF point in the horizontal direction, and after pressing AF selection button in the vertical direction. Exposure compensation must then be set after pressing the +/- button (there's no such button on the 5D Mark III, though, so I'm not sure if this can be done on a 5D Mark III).
  
• You can store a registered point (HP - Home Point) in the camera, and immediately move to that point by pressing the joystick down, or apply it during focusing by programming AF-ON to use the HP and half-press of the trigger button to use the currently selected point.
  

apersson850 wrote in post #16620251
No, that's the way it is.

There are several alternatives, though. Note that I'm thinking along the lines of the 1DX here, and although the two are very similar, they aren't identical, so there may be limitations when it comes to the 5D Mark III here.

• You can limit the number of selectable AF points. Thus it's quicker to go through them, but you can of course not select every one of them then
  
• Assuming you've not configured that away, you can select AF points by rolling top and real dials too. Since rolling is quicker than tap-tap-tap on the multicontroller, this method allows quick movements of the selected point. Drawbacks are that you have to press the AF selection button first, and that you need both dials to move in both directions.
  
• Rear dial can be set to directly select an AF point in the horizontal direction, and after pressing AF selection button in the vertical direction. Exposure compensation must then be set after pressing the +/- button (there's no such button on the 5D Mark III, though, so I'm not sure if this can be done on a 5D Mark III).
  
• You can store a registered point (HP - Home Point) in the camera, and immediately move to that point by pressing the joystick down, or apply it during focusing by programming AF-ON to use the HP and half-press of the trigger button to use the currently selected point.
  

I found the rollers much faster than the joystick, as one is generallly looking through the viewfinder at the time.
Re exposure compensation, I may be wrong but my understanding is this is limited to the centre point. Unless you lock it and recompose.
IMO that is the only defective thing on a 5D3!
Looking at a scene selecting the AF point. Then holding the centre point on the area you want correct exposure for, locking it and the recomposing so your selected Af point is when you want it - is useless in my opinion.
If I want the Af point on the eyes of a bride, but want the exposure for her face I really think at this price there should be a choice for exposure evaluation, centre point or selected Af point. Then I could select spot metering - and the camera default to evaluating exposure at that point. Then I could point at the face - lock exposure move slightly from the face to the eyes and press the shutter!
As it is, I get the eyes in focus very handy, but the exposure is set on her stomach!
I believe you have to upgrade to the 1DX to get what I want.

If I am wrong please correct me - love to learn how to overcome this one drawback on the 5D3. It would be the ONE perfect firmware upgrade IMO!

What you are mainly describing here is metering (of light), not exposure compensation.

It's true that spot metering linked to the currently selected AF point is available for the 1DX only (of today's camera bodies). The 1DX has enough metering zones for this to work with any of the 61 AF points, since out of the 252 metering zones, there's one covering each specific AF point. Cameras like the 1D Mark III allows spot metering linked to AF points as well, but only to the 19 manually selectable points. The other 26 AF points on that camera are for AF assist only.

The 1DX, sporting a 100000 pixel light metering array (the one that's broken down to 252 light metering zones), can also use this array to detect faces while shooting using the optical viewfinder. If you combine that with the camera's ALO (Auto Lighting Optimizer), the camera will automatically not only try to prioritize exposure to the area where the face is detected, but also automatically apply correction to shadows in back-lit faces. This goes directly into your jpegs and/or is saved as a tag in a RAW file, so that you can apply the in-shooting detected value of compensation immediately in DPP, to see if the result is to your liking.
In addition to this, you can use iTR in combination with using all focus points at the same time, to let the camera try to detect faces and both focus and expose them correctly. Whether you'd like to trust this for a wedding I don't know - haven't tried it like that. But it works better than I had anticipated for candids.

As far as I can understand spot metering linked to the active AF point is impossible with just a firmware upgrade on a 5D Mark III - it simply doesn't have a light meter with enough granularity to cover each of the 61 AF points individually. In this case you most likely need a hardware upgrade, to the 1DX, or whatever may follow in the future.

All this is 1DX technology at the moment. What you can do on simpler camera models is to use evaluative metering, since that type of light metering is quite heavily weighted towards the active AF point. Or you have to resort to spot metering in the center and either lock that exposure with the * button as long as you need it, or set it in M mode.

I'm sure you don't, though. The question wasn't regarding if the multcontroller can be used to select the AF point, but rather if it could auto-repeat, or if you had to push it to one side once of each "click", so that moving the AF point four steps would require four pushes to the controller.

There's also a wrap-around feature, by the way, thus going from far left to far right is just one click away.

Thanks for the info guys