Telephoto manual focusing

[benlonghair]

Hi everyone. Just got my Nikon 70-300 AF-S VR last week. Took about 600 shots with it this weekend, mostly of birds. The AF/MF mode is nice.

The autofocus seems to work fairly well. However once you start looking at the results focus tends to be a few inches to a foot or more behind or in front of the subject. It looks OK on the LCD, but once you download, it becomes pretty clear that AF just is not perfect. So I use the MF to try to get it spot on. I generally am not getting it.

This is pretty much 100% user error. Is there some techniques that I can use to capture small subjects at some distance?

Here's some samples that I posted over in the Nature and Wildlife forum. When I get done processing my shots from Sunday I'll post more.

As somebody said in that thread, some of it has to do with real tight crops and the lens being wide open. But it's more than that too, as those are the best of about 135 shots of those birds. The vast majority went out the window becaue of focus issues.

Tips would be appreciated.

 

[sburatorul]

well i think the combination of ISO 400 plus the wide open softness of the lens combined with crop did that to the photos in your post. try shooting at the lens soft spot. i think its somewhere between f8-f11. its a lot sharper there.