I own a walimex (German distributor) branded Samyang 85mm ƒ/1.4 Aspherical IF UMC
A lot of people complain in frustration about focusing this lens and without any provisions it's really hard to focus @ƒ/1.4 because of the extremely thin DOF it produces. So I did a few things which brought my success rate to around 95% (the remaining 5% are low contrast situations):
- I glued on an EMF chip for camera feedback
- I select the desired focus point manually - I have focus point selection programmed to the thumbwheel on my 60D
- in ML I switched on trap focus on shutter half press
For some strange reason the last one really does the trick - there seems to be a difference between manually pressing the shutter button and having ML do it automatically - I guess it's the time difference from the moment the camera aquires focus. ML trap focus brought my success rate from around 70% (even with focus confirmation!) to 95%!
Examples with very thin DOF:
here is a flickr set with a lot more pictures - all wide open w/ ML trap focus...
Thanks to the whole ML team for a really great product!
cheers and have a good time, all!
A lot of people complain in frustration about focusing this lens and without any provisions it's really hard to focus @ƒ/1.4 because of the extremely thin DOF it produces. So I did a few things which brought my success rate to around 95% (the remaining 5% are low contrast situations):
- I glued on an EMF chip for camera feedback
- I select the desired focus point manually - I have focus point selection programmed to the thumbwheel on my 60D
- in ML I switched on trap focus on shutter half press
For some strange reason the last one really does the trick - there seems to be a difference between manually pressing the shutter button and having ML do it automatically - I guess it's the time difference from the moment the camera aquires focus. ML trap focus brought my success rate from around 70% (even with focus confirmation!) to 95%!
Examples with very thin DOF:
here is a flickr set with a lot more pictures - all wide open w/ ML trap focus...
Thanks to the whole ML team for a really great product!
cheers and have a good time, all!