topic Re: R6 focus areas and points in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

EOS R6 Focus points recommendations for wrestling and boxing

theperfectplex — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 13:58:25 GMT

New to the R6 , any diagrams or pictures showing what focus points to use for which situation? I do pro wrestling and some boxing. The face tracking is helpful but it’s a bit more beneficial for me to get the entire body of the action.

Re: R6 focus areas and points

Waddizzle — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 21:37:02 GMT

Welcome!

If you’re new to the R6, which R6 model are you using? There have been two releases so far. The cameras have very similar, yet very different, AF tracking features. The two models have arguably identical AF Point selection options.

What type of camera have you previously used? What brand and which model?

Most professional photographers use as few AF points as possible. True gurus use only the center AF point.

Re: R6 focus areas and points

theperfectplex — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 22:18:21 GMT

R6 coming from m50

Re: R6 focus areas and points

Waddizzle — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:24:58 GMT

Welcome to the Canon Forums!

Your question is a difficult one to answer because it is so broad. What you need are tutorials. There is a lot of very useful material on You/tube. Here is one about the R6ii focus system.

But, knowing what the buttons and settings do is only half the picturee, Excuse the pun. When you buy a new car, the manufacturer provides a User Guide that tells you how to operate the car. However, the guide does not teach how to drive thee car.

The User Guide does not teach you anything about the rules of the road, how to read a map, none of it. You need to learn the basics of photography to understand what the different settings actually do. Again, there is a host of material on YouTube that can teach you about the basic of photography.

Just because you changed cameras does not mean the basic rules of photography change, too. All cars work basically the same way. Every car has the same set of controls; a steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, headlights, etc.

Cameras are no different. All of them have controls to allow you to set the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and fire the shutter. The main difference is that they look different on the outside, just like cars.

Re: R6 focus areas and points

p4pictures — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 16:56:33 GMT

Your EOS R6 (original version) can only do eye tracking when set to Face + tracking method. It will track the head of the subject using face + tracking method, and also any of the three Zone AF methods. If you use the Zone AF methods, the camera can only track the space inside the zone frame, and will not move the Zone area if the subject moves away from within the zone frame.

One thing that is helpful is to enable the initial AF point for servo AF - assuming you use servo AF. By default this is auto, but set it to either of the other two options and you will see a small AF frame - same size as the 1-pt AF frame - and you have use this frame to "direct" the camera to start looking for the subject at that point. You could use that to target one of the boxers or wrestlers and it will then follow that face / eye.

The spot AF, 1-pt AF and two expansion AF methods are not "intelligent" in that they do not use subject detection at all. They work in the same way as they do on a DSLR and also your old M50.

You might find these two blog posts I wrote to be helpful.

https://www.p4pictures.com/2022/04/decide-where-to-focus-eos-r5-r6-face-detection/

https://www.p4pictures.com/2021/01/which-af-area-method-to-use/

Re: EOS R6 Focus points recommendations for wrestling and boxing

ctitanic — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 17:49:10 GMT

Sport photography is very similar to Wildlife photography from the point of view of focusing. I use a dual back focus configuration, one button will do Eye Detection and tracking and the other will allow me to spot focus. I would recommend you to check this video of how is done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzUL8FzNx5U&t=669s

I have used this configuration in Karate matches and it works very well.