TIP: When the ambient light is too low for the autofocus mechanism to work properly, the camera will try to use its built-in red-orange LED to illuminate the subject briefly, thereby allowing the camera to focus “in the dark”.

“But what about those big red LEDs on accessory flashes that project a pattern onto the subject, so that even blank, featureless walls can be focused upon?” I hear you ask. The answer is “All Sony mirrorless cameras disable those LEDs in the flash. Theoretically the light they emit can’t be seen through the IR filter that is laminated in front of the sensor.” Okay, but they should still work when you attach an A-mount lens with an LA-EA2 or LA-EA4 adapter, right? (Regretfully the accessory flash’s LEDs are still disabled in this mode.).

 

3.3.4 Focus Confirmation

Your camera will confirm focus by one of the following 3 methods as shown in Figure 3-11:

• Left - If the camera doesn’t detect a face, it will show green brackets around the subject it is focusing on.
• Center – If Face Detection is ON (Section 6.34) and it does find a face, it will show you a grey, white, or green square around the entire face. (The square(s) start out white or grey but one will turn green when you press the shutter release halfway. That’s the face it’s focusing on.)
• Right – If you’re zoomed in past the lens’ natural abilities (using either Clear Image Zoom or Digital Zoom, described in Section 7.16), OR if you’re focusing in the dark using the focus assist light, then you’ll get a large green dotted line frame around the entire periphery. In these conditions the camera is working in “Center” Focus mode and you don't really have fine control over what part of the frame the camera is focusing on.

 

Figure 3-11: The camera will show focus confirmation 3 different ways, depending upon your subject matter and the camera settings.

 

3.3.5 Quickly Switching between Wide Area AF and Spot AF

Here’s another unobvious but incredibly useful tip: To quickly handle situations where the camera is just not finding your subject (usually due to clutter), out in the field, I find it time consuming to have to go to Fn --> Focus Area --> [choose one] just to switch between Lock-on AF Wide and Center or Flexible Spot. So here’s a very handy shortcut:

• First, make sure MENU --> 7 --> Custom Key(Shoot.) --> 1 --> Center Button --> Focus Standard.
• Then set your default autofocus area to Fn --> Focus Area --> Wide or Lock-on AF - Wide.

Whenever you need to switch to Center AF quickly, just press and hold the center of the control wheel. It will autofocus on whatever’s in the center, and then lock focus until you release the button. (So it behaves like AF-S, even if your AF mode is set to AF-C– an even handier thing!) Releasing the button goes back to your AF defaults.