2 hours ago, Susa said:

Hi, I updated it, everything is working fine for me, did a lot of macro (not underwater) ...

Did you see/experience any improvement in the focus department?

On 12/13/2025 at 1:00 PM, Atanas_Petrov said:

Did you see/experience any improvement in the focus department?

no, unfortunately not, autofocus, as special cont autofocus is still very unsatisfying for me (macro use). What is new is, that you can create your own customized focus points

3 hours ago, Susa said:

no, unfortunately not, autofocus, as special cont autofocus is still very unsatisfying for me (macro use). What is new is, that you can create your own customized focus points

Hi Susa,

Could you give us some more details about the problems you encountered with the AF in macro? You are talking about shooting on land and in photography, right? No video?

20 hours ago, Davide DB said:

Hi Susa,

Could you give us some more details about the problems you encountered with the AF in macro? You are talking about shooting on land and in photography, right? No video?

Hi Davide, many thanks for your interest!

Yes it's only with stills. Before a few weeks I posted about it, using cont. autofocus without AI object detection doesn't work precise enough for macro work, on land or underwater makes no difference. And its also not about too less focus light or bad autofocus conditions. I try to explain, please excuse my English but I'm no native speaker :-) :

Please see picture one, this is my motive, setting the focus point (small) to the red mark, which I want to focus on, second picture is where my focus ends up in blue, when I move my camera while focusing. The pictures are only for illustrating what I mean. In reality the output is, that for example the eyes are not sharp. This happens not with A1, A1 II, A7V, but with A9 III it's the same problem. I already talk with Sony about it, they had the explanation that the sensor of the A7R5 is too slow, hmmmm, but that can't be the case for the A9III, we tried it in a shop together with a Sony guy and with different cameras, Canon R5 was the best result :-( .

Would be really interested how your thoughts are! I have the A7R5 from beginning on and I think at the beginning this was not the case, it worked much better and I had better results.

Hi Susa,
I replied you in the other thread and as I wrote, I'm not a Sony user and this is a very specific situation. try to open a specific thread so that other users notice it and can give you their contributions.

Ciao

11 hours ago, Susa said:

Hi Davide, many thanks for your interest!

Yes it's only with stills. Before a few weeks I posted about it, using cont. autofocus without AI object detection doesn't work precise enough for macro work, on land or underwater makes no difference. And its also not about too less focus light or bad autofocus conditions. I try to explain, please excuse my English but I'm no native speaker :-) :

Please see picture one, this is my motive, setting the focus point (small) to the red mark, which I want to focus on, second picture is where my focus ends up in blue, when I move my camera while focusing. The pictures are only for illustrating what I mean. In reality the output is, that for example the eyes are not sharp. This happens not with A1, A1 II, A7V, but with A9 III it's the same problem. I already talk with Sony about it, they had the explanation that the sensor of the A7R5 is too slow, hmmmm, but that can't be the case for the A9III, we tried it in a shop together with a Sony guy and with different cameras, Canon R5 was the best result :-( .

Would be really interested how your thoughts are! I have the A7R5 from beginning on and I think at the beginning this was not the case, it worked much better and I had better results.

For some reason, i seem to have this exact same thing. A1ii+100mm.

Shooting nudis, initial focus on rhinopore and then it just buggers off to grain of sand or a spot on nudi.

Didnt have any of this on A7RV+90mm, always spot on.

Maybe mods can break this into own thread?

5 minutes ago, Sokrates said:

For some reason, i seem to have this exact same thing. A1ii+100mm.

Shooting nudis, initial focus on rhinopore and then it just buggers off to grain of sand or a spot on nudi.

Didnt have any of this on A7RV+90mm, always spot on.

Maybe mods can break this into own thread?

I have it with the 100mm Sony macro (and other lenses like 70-200 f4 macro) on my A7RV. It is very easy to reproduce.

Edited Tuesday at 10:34 PM2 days by Susa
Addition of a statement

I shoot quite a bit of macro, not a Sony user however I think I can offer some thoughts. When you are life size, your depth of field is very small - around about 1mm, so it stands to reason that you need to be able to compensate for the fact your subject might be moving, you may not be totally stable and surge and current might intrude into the picture causing both you and your subject to move.

My regular UW shooting is done in Botany Bay south of Sydney, this site is inside the heads but rather exposed to ocean swells which can produce varying degrees of surge and also subject to tidal currents, one of the subjects there is the pygmy pipehorse and swings slightly out of sync with the surge. My technique with that is continuous AF, holding down the control as required while framing and waiting for it to swing into position. The AF chases and swings around quite a bit as the subject moves out from under the single small AF point. The trick to me seems to be patience waiting until the subject is in position then activating AF and if needed half pressing the shutter to engage IS which helps hold the AF point on target. The shot is taken when I can see positively that the AF has grabbed focus.

The point is that IS can account for side to side, up and down movement, bu the AF needs to deal with our back and forth movement, so anything you can do to minimise this will be a great help. How well can you hover? DO you use a pointer or grab a safe handhold on bare rock to stabilise?

You talk about moving off target is this because you/the subject moved or are you saying the camera decided that another object was better to focus on? I used to use C-AF plus tracking but have reverted to C-AF without tracking using the smallest AF point, then it's up to me to stay on the target and I find I can make this work, certainly don't get every frame sharp, but what I get is acceptable.

I have the same problem with Sony macro lenses; i.e. actual point of focus is often not where you put it when you took the photo (check by reviewing in camera to compare). Even worse, sometimes the result is simply out of focus when again, the camera indicated 'in focus' when you took the photo. This can happen at all distances, not just macro. It is worse in dim light. It happens on land too, with insect macro.

My solution is to 'slow down', allowing the AF time to settle, before taking the photo. This helps, but not great if you are in a hurry!

You can also take multiple shots, and hope that the camera got it right at least once - it usually does.

I shoot AFC / tracking / medium spot exclusively UW, and for land macro. I have experimented with "AF sensitivity" setting, but without any obvious improvement, so I leave this on 3 (default).

It occurs to me I should try turning OIS off.

Non-macro lenses sometimes show the same problem, but the result is usually OK due to the (usually) greater DOF.

I concluded some time ago that Sony AF still has heaps of room for improvement. They seem to have prioritised development of AF with subject recognition, at the expense of AF accuracy when subject recognition is switched off.

I forgot to mention: for land insect macro, switching on 'Insect (eye)' improved things considerably.

But for UW, I have found 'Animal (eye)' not very effective - works sometimes for (some) fish, but main problem is false positives, which you may not notice until after you download (you think you got the shot - but turns out you didn't, and nowhere near it!). So I don't use it UW.

I am not sure that I understand the problem 100%, but I think I get the idea..

I have A7R5 and Sony 90mm macro with and w/o SMC-1. I set to AF&tracking with medium spot (AI "animal recognition/eye" can be toggled on/off; very important in some cases as AI sometimes runs into a wrong place). Often eye is not recognized, then I toggle to small spot (more difficult to target, but when I manage to focus on the eye (e.g. snail) it is often perfect). Camera is set to release the shutter only when correct focus is detected (sometimes troublesome since camera does not release immediately, but I do not need the photos when focus is clearly off)...

Not all photos have the focus where it was supposed to be, therefore I make multiple photos of an object and then there are some sucessful photos amongst them (the rest is deleted).

=> I consider this to be already excellent "high-tech" AF compared to previously used Olympus EM5II (clearly worse AF) and EM1II (similar, but slightly worse AF (clearly worse when CMC-1 diopter was attached to Zuiko 60mm))...

Wolfgang

Edited 19 hours ago19 hr by Architeuthis

10 hours ago, dentrock said:

I have the same problem with Sony macro lenses; i.e. actual point of focus is often not where you put it when you took the photo (check by reviewing in camera to compare). Even worse, sometimes the result is simply out of focus when again, the camera indicated 'in focus' when you took the photo. This can happen at all distances, not just macro. It is worse in dim light. It happens on land too, with insect macro.

My solution is to 'slow down', allowing the AF time to settle, before taking the photo. This helps, but not great if you are in a hurry!

You can also take multiple shots, and hope that the camera got it right at least once - it usually does.

I shoot AFC / tracking / medium spot exclusively UW, and for land macro. I have experimented with "AF sensitivity" setting, but without any obvious improvement, so I leave this on 3 (default).

It occurs to me I should try turning OIS off.

Non-macro lenses sometimes show the same problem, but the result is usually OK due to the (usually) greater DOF.

I concluded some time ago that Sony AF still has heaps of room for improvement. They seem to have prioritised development of AF with subject recognition, at the expense of AF accuracy when subject recognition is switched off.

Hi, thanks for your clarification, and the case is, that someone from Sony confirms that this is a problem (here in Vienna in a Sony authorized shop during the presentation of the A7V. I will try out now what you described.

On 12/17/2025 at 4:47 AM, Chris Ross said:

You talk about moving off target is this because you/the subject moved or are you saying the camera decided that another object was better to focus on? I used to use C-AF plus tracking but have reverted to C-AF without tracking using the smallest AF point, then it's up to me to stay on the target and I find I can make this work, certainly don't get every frame sharp, but what I get is acceptable.

it happens in different cases, one is when I move the camera a little bit to have the subject more left or right for example. The other case is, when the subject is moving and I try to follow. This is also on land with the camera fixed on a table and moving the object a little bit.

My main issue is that the AI tracks and then decides its not the subject.

Like stationary(some movement but you know) nudi, initial focus on rhinopore and its stays there 5-10 seconds, then the AI just suddenly decides its not where to focus and goes to the gills, body or sand. Insect, Animal, eye/head/body doesnt matter. Ok nudibranch isnt the most common subject that the AI has learned im sure.

Also tried little bit with tripod, to minimize camera movement, and set focus on point x and thought its good, but camera actually focuses on point z that was just outside/edge of the box.

This happens without the AI subject recognition also.

I basically no longer use tracking UW, it seems to work quite well on the eye of a bird but not so well UW on my system. I suspect this around the camera not being trained on your subject, so whether AI subject recognition is on or not is one thing, but if tracking is enabled without it the camera still needs to remember what it was focusing on and follow it. It probably has recovery features if it loses it, but can only do so much.

So this means i have to place the small spot where I want focus and fire when it achieves focus, works well as long as the subject doesn't suddenly sway due to surge. It takes some practice to achieve this and I've found hand held macro photography on land to be a decent taring ground.