Where do I even begin? *big post*

[bitsnpieces]

I don't know your camera and the various focus setups, but I've had success shooting sports in manual at 1/1000 at f6.3, Auto ISO and using a 9 point area focus. In the past I made the mistake of using too great an area for focus points, either 51 or one of the other dynamic focus settings which covers most of the view finder. The problem with this is if there are other things moving that might take the focus away from the main subject.

That may have been the problem - too wide of a spectrum for the camera to work with, how would it know what it needs to focus on right?

Face Detection. You mention point and shoots, so now lets consider that. When you use a P&S with face detection, think about how long the camera takes to firstly recognise there are faces and then focus on them. Now swap to your sport shoot. You probably wanted to get the action as it happens, but if you have face detection turned on, your camera is doing the same as the P&S, it is running the face detection systems and trying to find faces, then when it does, focus on them, but this time your subjects are moving around. So by the time the camera software goes, Oh ah face, lets focus on it... that face has turned around, moved away, click..miss!

I guess that probably goes in line of what wmvaux said also, the camera struggling to focus on too many points. Will see what happens with detection off.

In fact most photographers want the opposite, they want a narrow depth of field over great distances, thus another reason we see f2.8, f1.8 and f1.4 lenses in existence.

That's interesting indeed - I'm guessing it's so the shot looks clean right? Up close, clean shot of their target, things else blurred? Understandable. I presumed it would bit a little harder to focus is all, because of the deeper depth of field, so I thought using f5 would be okay, not too deep, and incase I miss the focus (I had pretty much anticipated this would happen already lol), I can still get a decent amount of focus going - breathing room.

But as mentioned, last night was to really see what the a65 could do, throw on its fancy features and let it rip, managing 1700 pictures with 50% power left, that's a lot of photos... surprised my inexperienced self. :P


But regarding face detection, thus, still unanswered and hoping to get a clearer understanding.
So understandable in sports, probably not efficient, but in a portrait or group photo, this is the purpose of it pretty much. True, we didn't need it back in the days, but it's a nice feature, and a feature I don't know how to make work on the a65 yet, thus my questioning here - am I using the wrong setting somewhere?

Because I did take a few group photos, static poses, people sitting down, smiling, no problems. Boxes appear, but when I click to focus, it focuses to the centre AF point, which is on their chest or knee or wherever it may be at the time. Maybe a little off centre too, but never the face. I used Wide AF area because I read that was required to give the camera room to scan the image and focus.
My only ideas are, the face didn't line up on one of the AF points, which I think is ludicrous if this is a requirement (so definitely won't be needed face detection), there wasn't enough light/contrast to focus with (but things were well lit and the boxes did appear after all - it knows the face is there), the aperture was too wide (so with the big depth of field, it would struggle recognising multiple faces across the plain, I guess?), and who knows what else. Maybe I had a wrong setting somewhere and didn't realise that, meh?

Reason I ask about this is more so because I had my Sony Cyber-shot DSC WX300, face detection worked very quickly on that. The boxes appears, it knows the face is there, I focus (almost instantly focuses the face), and snap. It didn't snap at a random other focus point where you get the multiple squares that the point & shoots focus on, it was dead on the face most of the time, sometimes if the subject moved and it was able to keep up.

I guess that's only my real beef about the a65 at the moment. It's not that it's a must have tool, but it's a nice function to have if I ever want to use it, just like working on manual focus is fine, but auto is nice to have and makes life easier (in reference to my post about finding another lens to use here)

So yeah, just trying to make sure I know how to make use of all the features.

I did notice though that the 28-75mm felt to focus slow a little... The auto rotating wasn't hugely quick. Catching was easy, just the speed to focus - I guess it's trying to move quietly? Or I could be over expecting.