The Problem with Eye AF

Suddenly, without warning, 45 feet of whale was suspended above the ocean. Like some unseen intercontinental ballistic missile launched from the deep abyss, a massive humpback launches itself skyward, putting on an unexpected aerial display off the port side of the boat. This is the stuff that supports whale watching tours the world over. Dolphins do it. Orcas do it. Grays do it. So do minke, blue, fin, right, and sperm whales. But when it comes to the great cetaceans of the world, none can compare to the aerial displays of the humpback.

For as long as people have tried to understand these leviathans, we really had no idea as to why they breached the way they do. Hypotheses abounded, of course. They did it simply because they could. For fun. To rid themselves of parasites. To look for birds (which equated to schools of fish). But in 2016, a paper published in the academic journal, Marine Mammal Science, claimed that breaching was a means of communication with other humpbacks. Tail slaps, fin slaps, and full-on launches into the sky, result in a very specific acoustic profile underwater. And all of which tend to occur ONLY when other humpback whales are within 4000 meters of the jumper / splasher / communicator.

This is ethology in a nutshell (the study of animal behavior). We can’t simply ask the humpback why they humpback. It’s a giant game of Clue. “I believe that Professor Plum did it with the candlestick in the kitchen. Can you prove me wrong?”

But one thing that is certain in all of this is that I completely missed every single shot of the breaching humpback.

Every. Single. Frame.

Why?

I botched this entire opportunity for one reason: I was using eye detect autofocus – you know, the new-fangled autofocus settings everyone is raving about.

Prior to finding myself staring at 45 feet of whale defying gravity, I was photographing harbor seals on ice. Icebergs that were once part of the tidewater glacier at the head of the fjord I was floating in make for perfect hangouts if you’re a harbor seal. And hundreds of these seals could be seen lounging around on bergs as they floated past the boat.

Harbor seals have a face like a golden Lab. Light colored fur. Big round dark eyes. A dark nose that contrasts with the fur. And of course, there is the perma-grin. Honestly, they look like some sort of happy Jabba the Hut on ice to me. But most importantly, at least for the sake of a discussion on autofocus, that pattern of eyes and nose is going to be instantly recognized by the pattern recognition software working in your camera’s autofocus system.

Hand holding my 400mm lens with the Z9 attached and set to 3D-tracking with animal eye detect, the oh-so-loved little green box instantly grabbed the eye of the harbor seal and held fast no matter what amount of rocking and rolling happened to the boat beneath me.

But when we compare this harbor seal to the humpback whale, the situation could not have been more different.

For starters, if I polled readers of this article and asked them to put an X where the eye should go on the silhouette of a humpback whale, it’s likely that 70% of folks would get it wrong. Heck, even when standing on the bow of a boat looking at that great leviathan suspended in the air in good light, it’s still nearly impossible to find their eye.

So, if I can’t find the eye of the whale immediately, how on Earth can I expect my camera to find it?

Despite all the fanfare behind eye detect autofocus, the fact of the matter is that it fails just as often as it succeeds and it doesn’t matter if we are talking about the Sony A1, Nikon Z9, Canon R3, or Olympus M1X.

Don’t get me wrong here. I love this new feature in our cameras. I have my cameras set up to use eye detect AF by default. However, I also have my camera setup so I can instantly override this setting with the press of a button.

Mastering your autofocus system doesn’t mean setting your camera to eye AF and hoping for the best. Owning a fancy new camera with a sophisticated bunch of settings only gets us so far in this game of wildlife photography. Our cameras continue to carry autofocus area modes such as single point and close focus priority for a reason. There is a time and a place for eye AF. And there is a time and a place for all those other settings as well.

When we adopt a set it and forget mentality, we are setting ourselves up for failure. It’s as simple as that. And as much as I love eye tracking in the Sony A1, Nikon Z9, and Canon R5 (I still haven’t shot with the R3 yet) I continue find myself shooting with single point AF and close focus priority (without eye AF turned on) ON A DAILY BASIS.

But this isn’t just about photographing giant black whales with comparatively tiny black eyes. There are a million things in the environment that will trip up and fool the eye AF capabilities of our cameras. Falling snow is one such scenario many wildlife photographers across the Northern Hemisphere are currently facing. Water droplets, such as those suspended around the humpback whale I mention above, is another. Then you have the tips of branches, ticks latched on to the ear of black bears, the little black spot on the rump of bighorn sheep, and so many other things that inevitably pop up and confuse the computers inside of our cameras. Some of these situations can be predictable such as the snow and water droplets. Others, such as ticks and sticks, cannot. And it’s these unpredictable situations where having an instant override to the eye AF becomes critical important.

While there are a lot of different ways to customize our cameras today to fit our specific needs, here is how I like to set things up for Nikon, Sony, and Canon. . .

Nikon (Z9)

When my camera turns on, it is already set to 3D-Tracking. This is my default AF area mode for wildlife photography which is activated by pressing the AF-On button. However, I set the FN1 button on the front of the camera to single point AF. Whenever my camera is struggling to lock onto the eye of my subject, I can simply hold down the FN1 button with my middle finger to override the 3D-Tracking and use single point AF.

Sony (A1)

With the Sony A1, I use Tracking: Expanded Spot (with eye AF turned on, of course) for most situations which kicks in automatically when I press the AF-On button. On the AEL button, however, I set to Expanded Spot (no tracking or eye AF).

Canon (R5)

My default AF Area Mode with this camera is eye AF set to the AF-On button and Spot AF set to the * button.

If you want to know more about eye AF, when it works and when it doesn’t, make sure you check out the feature article in the winter issue of PhotoWILD Magazine where I take a deep dive into how it works and when it fails. And don’t forget, on April 2nd, 2023, I am giving away a spot on my Kenai Fjords workshop this summer to one very lucky subscriber of the magazine who will get to hang out on boats with me for 5 days to photograph these very same harbor seals on ice and humpback whales (amongst many other species).