Tracking Test

[Andrea B.]

The Mohave Desert seems endless after a long day shooting wildflowers. So I was tired and bored on the way home and decided to play with some tracking experiments. In this particular effort I and the camera locked onto the fence sign while we were traveling about 70mph (112.6 kmh). I shot five frames in 1 second. (Or 2 seconds?) At that point I could not turn around in the car seat to continue panning.

D750 + 24-70/2.8 AFS
AF-C and GrP Tracking and AF-ON

The only upsetting thing was the quickly filled 750 buffer. But then we should not expect huge buffering for this level of camera??
Anyway, methinks there seems to be some pretty good tracking and focus under the stated set-up and conditions. 
Good human reflexes are required also. And lots of practice.

Some unresized excerpts of the sign follow the larger shots to show that things stayed in focus while me, the camera and the car were all moving.

Added:  We think the sign was about 25-30 feet (7.6 - 9.1 meters) fom the car.

[armando_m]

The Mohave Desert seems endless after a long day shooting wildflowers. So I was tired and bored on the way home and decided to play with some tracking experiments. In this particular effort I and the camera locked onto the fence sign while we were traveling about 70mph on the highway. I shot five frames in 1 second. (Or 2 seconds?) At that point I could not turn around in the car seat to continue panning.

D750 + 24-70/2.8 AFS
AF-C and Grp Tracking and AF-ON

The only upsetting thing was the quickly filled 750 buffer. But then we should not expect huge buffering for this level of camera??
Anyway, methinks there seems to be some pretty good tracking and focus under the stated set-up and conditions. 
Good human reflexes are required also. And lots of practice.

Some unresized excerpts of the sign follow the larger shots to show that things stayed in focus as me, the camera and the car were all moving.

Sometimes, one has to find ways to be busy !
When group tracking is on, does auto, 3D or any of the D51, D39 D11 mode have any effect ?

[Andrea B.]

Sometimes, one has to find ways to be busy !
 

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When AF-C is selected, then the focus area choices are S, d9, d21, d51, GrP, 3d and Auto. These settings cannot be combined.

When GrP is chosen, there are 4 highlighted AF squares which can be seen in the viewfinder. These 4 squares are easy to see and also were easy to place onto the desired subject as long as it was not too small. I also used d9 fairly successfully in this experiment-from-boredom. But it was a bit harder to see the little dotted outline for d9.

When I practiced sequences where the motion was towards the camera at 70mph, I had a couple of failures along with some good sequences. I think for this motion tracking I should have tried just a single AF square by using the S setting? I'm not sure yet about what works best because I definitely need more practice in that kind of tracking.
Added Later:  Of course I was shooting through the front windshield of the car. That really didn't help matters.

Anyway ---- get someone to drive you around in a car if you want to practice tracking!!   

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My husband said we were going 70mph. Knowing him, we could have been going 85mph on those big empty roads!! I eventually drove him nuts with the shutter clacks and panning and had to stop.