Last night we had some family and friends over to celebrate Hanukkah. Anyway, when my son-in-law, daughter and grandson decided it was time to light the menorah, I thought this would be a nice time to grab my G7X (as opposed to my EM10) and get some shots of them.
I have the camera set - when I want to just quickly grab the camera - to Program mode and even though my preferred setting (at least with Olympus cameras that I have grown used to) is to use only the center AF point and have Face Detection enabled. But - as I have mentioned before - apparently this will not work on Canon cameras (at least their P&S ones) because Canon't implementation of Face Detection will not override the center AF point selection. Hence I left the camera on Face AIAF.
I took either 5 or 6 shots of the three of them near the menorah. Of the shots, two had the faces completely out of focus even though (1) the faces were selected while looking at the LCD and (2) when looking at images in Apple Aperture and clicking to see the selected AF points, the faces were also shown as selected. What was in focus was the living room wall about 20 feet behind them. (BTW - the other shots showed the faces properly focused.) But to get that high a failure rate when (1) the light was certainly bright enough to use Face Detection, (2) the AF Assist Lamp was enabled and did go off, and (3) most confusingly the camera seemed to be selecting the faces but focused on something else.
Now I know that using more than a single AF point is allowing the camera to select what it likes, but what I don't understand is why when the camera is correctly selecting the faces, why it would then decide to focus on the background.
Any suggestions - aside from using the touch screen to select the AF point?
Thanks, Steve
