The Best of Wedding Photography.pdf - Free

of four or five areas of the viewfinder (the center and four
outer quadrants). This allows you to “decenter” your images
and create more dynamic compositions. Once accustomed
to quickly changing the AF area, this feature
becomes an extension of the photographer’s technique.
Autofocus and moving subjects used to be an almost
insurmountable problem. While you could predict the rate
of movement and focus accordingly, the earliest AF systems
could not. Now, however, most AF systems use a
form of predictive autofocus, meaning that the system
28 THE BEST OF WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY
ABOVE—Predictive autofocus allows the photographer to choose the zone
of the viewfinder from where the AF is active and focus on a moving
subject. The camera’s software takes over, predicting the rate of movement
and focusing accordingly. In this image by David Beckstead, a
slow shutter speed was used to blur regions around the bride, enhancing
the sense of motion. Additional effects were added in Photoshop.
LEFT—Like shooting sports, sometimes you have to blanket a moving
group like this with exposures to get the great expressions. Focus can be
a problem, but when a group is moving toward you, the movement is
fairly predictable and constant. Also, most predictive AF systems will
handle this kind of movement easily. Note the priceless expression on the
bride’s face. Photograph by Tibor Imely.
senses the speed and direction of the movement of the
main subject and reacts by tracking the focus of the moving
subject. This is an ideal feature for wedding photojournalism,
which is anything but predictable.
A new addition to autofocus technology is dense multisensor-area
AF, in which an array of AF sensor zones (up
to 45 at this writing) are packed within the frame, making
precision focusing much faster and more accurate. These
AF zones are user-selectable or can all be activated at the
same time for the fastest AF operation.