When Autofocus Fails
I bought an 800mm lens just for this occasion. Wyoming was, well, Wyoming in the winter. Cold. Vast. White. And snow was falling hard. I was scouting for an upcoming workshop, trying to get a pulse on the wildlife activity. Which bull moose were showing themselves? How many bighorns had come down from their high horse of a mountain? Had the mountain goats begun to concentrate in the canyon yet given the many feet of snow up high?
On a frozen river, I saw a sliver of water free from the prison of ice and snow. Superheated water fed by geothermal activity seeped from the bank here and the result was an ice-free snake like run of open water. Red colored the snow in places, the signs of blood smeared across the white of winter.
It was the blood that caught my attention from the distance. Cracks in ice are normal. Red stained snow is an anomaly worth noting. And so, I pulled out my 10x42 Swarovski field glasses to inspect.
At first, it was all ice and snow and blood. Then there were bubbles. Ripples. A swirl in the water. And suddenly a North American river otter hauled himself from the ink black water and onto the snow.
It’s always fascinating to me how different species go about surviving the winter. Migration, for instance, is just a simple matter of ditching one location so as to not have to deal with the season. Hibernation is the strategy of sleeping through it all, hoping life will be better when you wake up. But the real unsung heroes are those species who choose not to flee, or sleep, but to endure the very worse that Jack Frost, that mass murderer of winter, has to throw at life.
Otters are survivors. And it’s the cracks in the ice like this that allow for river otters to endure. Well, that and half a million hairs per square inch they grow to keep their luxurious coats of fur so glorious and insulating. Three days ago the wind chill factor was minus 55 here, and it was still no match for otters.
Recognizing the opportunity that was unfolding – river otter who was actively hunting cutthroat trout, falling snow, etc. – I pulled a pair of MSR snowshoes from the back of my truck and began working my way down a steep embankment through 4 feet of snow with the new 800pf lens attached to my Z9.
Small subjects, skittish subjects, those that lay around on ice I’m too afraid to walk out on – this is what an 800mm was designed for!
While having all of that extra reach in a situation like this is immensely helpful, there are basic environmental challenges that are only made worse when working with long telephoto lenses. Light traveling through different densities of air created by the cold, for instance, can become a monumental challenge to overcome - something I wrote about extensively in Overcoming Winter Challenges inside the Winter 2023 issue of PhotoWILD Magazine. But another is simply the falling of the snow.
It doesn’t matter which camera system you are working with, falling snow can present an insurmountable obstacle for your autofocus system. Just a couple days after this otter, I found myself photographing a rare silver fox hunting in the heavy falling snow. Neither the Nikon Z9 nor the Sony A1 could hit focus on the fox who was bobbing and weaving through sagebrush while significant accumulation of snow piled up all around.
If your focusing strategy begins and ends with using eye autofocus, you can forget about coming home with in focus images in these situations (I wrote a feature article in the same issue of PhotoWILD all about when eye autofocus fails). In fact, if your focusing strategy is at all dependent upon autofocus, then you will likely come home with soft photos every single time in these situations.
When it comes to handling falling snow, there is only one tried and true technique that will produce the results you are looking for: manual focus.
Yeah, I said it. Sony couldn’t do it. Nikon couldn’t do it. And while I didn’t have a Canon R3 on hand, I can assure you the results would have been exactly the same.
Eye detect autofocus is just going to see snowflakes as eyeballs 99% of the time. Close focus priority modes like group or zone are just going to focus on the closest thing inside the array of AF sensors that are turned on – which will be the falling snow. While single point AF is going to be significantly better than any other AF area mode in this situation, you are still going to struggle to obtain anything better than a 50% success rate for a subject that isn’t moving – like the otter. Throw in a hunting silver fox and that success rate drops to around 10%.
Manual focus.
Yes, there is a reason our cameras still come with this option. There is a reason why $14K lenses still come with manual focusing rings and why professional quality glass always comes with a manual focus override built into the lens itself.
Manual focus is still relevant – even with wildlife photography.
Luckily though, with todays modern mirrorless cameras, manual focus has never in the history of wildlife photography been easier than it is now. And if you have not yet experimented with focus peaking, then you are currently missing out on one of the most important benefits to having a mirrorless camera over a DSLR.
Focus peaking has been around for a while. It first popped up in video – which didn’t really have a need for a mirror to be flapping around in front of the imaging sensor to begin with. Not until mirrorless cameras, however, did it move out of “live view only” on DSLR cameras and into the standard operation of our cameras.
In the days before autofocus, our viewfinders all had handy little accessories built in to help us find focus. When autofocus was invented, however, all that went away. For the last few decades, manually focusing was tremendously challenging. Sure, on a static subject, you could zoom, zoom, zoom in and check focus. But on a moving subject? Forget about it.
Now, with focus peaking, our cameras will place a red, blue, green, or white (you assign the color) outline around anything and everything that is in focus. Photographing through dense foliage and just want the eye of a wolf in focus? Focus peaking to the rescue. Photographing in heavy fog, rain, or at macro level distances? Focus peaking to the rescue. Photographing in falling snow? Focus peaking to the rescue.
Light snow fall is usually not an issue. And sometimes, if you wait long enough, the snow will lighten up enough for your camera’s autofocus to go to work doing what it was designed to do. But I don’t always want to wait for light snow. Sometimes it’s the heavy stuff that creates the ethereal look and feel to a composition that is what I’m looking for. And it’s in these instances that focus peaking allows us to achieve 100% success rates on static subjects and 60+% success rates for moving subjects.
If you want to master wildlife photography, then you must understand how to use the tools in our hands in the most adverse and challenging of situations. Often, it’s in these moments when the most compelling and beautiful opportunities present themselves. If you haven’t done so yet, check out the focus peaking option in your camera and begin experimenting with it. This one simple feature has the power to revolutionize your photography, allowing you to work in situations you likely would have left the camera in the bag for otherwise.
And if you are someone who wants to learn more about overcoming the challenges of winter photography or the nuances of when and why eye detect autofocus succeeds and fails, then you will want to check out the Winter issue of PhotoWILD Magazine. In addition to the magazine itself, you also receive regular articles about wildlife photography available only to subscribers, and are automatically entered to win our workshop giveaways – such as the one we are doing right to Alaska with myself and Annalise Kaylor this summer (drawing is April 2nd).
