From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

Enabling AF point display - 5D Tutorial

From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

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Enabling AF point display

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There are a few reasons that you might have an image that's out of focus. One, you might have a slow enough shutter speed that your hand shakes the camera, and blurs your image. Two, you might have a shallow enough depth of field that things in your image that you want to be in focus are actually falling out of the range of depth of field. And three, your autofocus just might not be focused in the right place. If you're reviewing an image, and finding that it's a little soft, and wondering why it's out of focus, and there's no immediate explanation, such as a conspicuously slow shutter speed, you might want to go in here, into the third page of the playback category, to AF point display, and set it to Enable. This will now show you which autofocus point was used when the image was taken. Here I can see that there's one of my thigh, and here is one on this tree branch, and here it was right in the center. So this is a way of reviewing where autofocus was working, and that can cue you in as to whether maybe you're not using autofocus properly, maybe you had your camera set to weird focus point, or maybe autofocus is working fine, and you need to look for another explanation, such as slow shutter speed, or shallow depth of field. So it's a nice kind of forensics tool that can help you get an understanding of what's going wrong when you get an image with soft focus.

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