EOS R5 Mark II - toggle Eye Detection with a button?

[leifdixon]

Going absolutely bonkers with this and there has to be an easy solution but I can't figure it out. What am I doing wrong?

I want to be able to toggle Eye Detection on/off with one of the customizable buttons. Period. I've chosen the "AF On" button, and there is a menu option to assign Eye Detection to this button...but it doesn't toggle. It might be turning it on, but it doesn't turn it off. 

The Eye Detection is an amazing feature, but the fact that it's global is killing me. If I'm shooting people...great. But if I want to focus on the bride's bouquet of flowers that she's holding (for example), I might be in "spot" or "expand" AF mode, but the camera will ignore the fact that I've placed the focusing icon onto the flowers and jump instead to her eyes. Again and again.

I even tried creating a "my menu" with the Eye Detection option chosen so I could quickly jump into the menu to toggle it, but it seems that Eye Detection is a dependency of some other options and sometimes the camera will not even allow me to disable Eye Detection, which is super frustrating.

I'm going to assume that I'm doing something wrong, so please tell me! But if Eye Detection is truly a global "always on" or "always off" option that can't be toggled, this is a giant fail in my opinion. There needs to be a way to quickly toggle it without digging into the menus.

[p4pictures · Accepted solution]

Yes you can have a button - AF-ON is one that will toggle eye detection on/off. I do something similar with my EOS R6 Mark II and assigned the movie record button to toggle eye detection on/off. 

However there are a couple of important things to know.

1. The function you need is actually eye detection. You will find this in the table of AF functions available for customisation in this section of the manual, it is between eye detection AF and spot detection.  https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-08_Customize_0030.html#Customize_0030_1-1 

When you press the button the camera will cycle between the available eye detection AF options. I limit my camera to only have eye detection auto, and eye detection off. The camera defaults though include eye detection left eye and eye detection right eye. 

https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-04_AF-Drive_0060.html#AF-Drive_0060_5

This is the setting for limiting eye detection to just on and off.

https://cam.start.canon/en/C017/manual/html/UG-04_AF-Drive_0100.html#AF-Drive_0100_2-4 

Even with eye detection disabled then the camera will use the chosen subject type to move the AF point on to the subject. If you have the camera set with the subject to detect as people, then aim a frame at a subject close to a face it is very likely to focus on the face thanks to subject detection being active.

However for what you want you have another option. Your camera has four additional AF areas, these have a small lock icon on the corner. When these are used the camera switches off the subject detection - and also eye detection - and will only focus on the closest subject that is under the AF point. This is how DSLRs have worked in the past. To make use of that, I suggest limiting the AF areas to speed up switching between them.