The
Nikon F4
by
J. Ramón Palacios tell
a friend about this article
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THE
AUTOFOCUS AND FOCUS TRACKING
For
today's standards the F4's focusing speed may seem sluggish
for some; for the day it was incredible fast, faster than that
of the N8008s. And even today it produces amazing results in
the hands of pros as shown below:
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Nancy
Rutherford snowboarding off a ridge in the Wasatch Mountains
of Utah, taken with a Nikon F4s armed with a Nikkor
AF 24mm f/2.8D, at 1/1000 sec, f/5.6. Photo by James
Kay. To view more of James' adventure sports and fine-art
landscape photography, please visit his site at www.jameskay.com.
This image was featured on the cover of the Nikon Full
Line Product Guide No. 6
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On the Nikon
F4, you set the focusing mode at "C" for continuous focus
and the winding speed at "CL" and automatic focus tracking
becomes a reality. That is all you have to do. The camera
will track the subject for as long as you have the shutter
half depressed and the subject is kept inside the brackets
in the viewfinder.
Even
for an amateur like me, with an outdated zoom like the
Nikkor 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 AF (now replaced with the splendid
70-300mm f/4-5.6G ED AF-S VR) it is possible to make focus
tracking pictures like the one shown at right, provided
you also use fast ISO film as in this example, taken on
Kodak Gold 400.
The
picture shows Captain John Ledingham, of the Irish Showjumping
team, at Club Hípico La Silla, in Monterrey Mexico,
while competing for the Pulsar Crown a few years back. |
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The
auto focus capabilities of the F4 have been greatly exaggerated
as "poor" or "hunting" by users of large aperture zooms. If
you pre focus and lock it -or at least use the limit switch-
the zoom performs well, not to mention when you mount on it
lenses like the Nikkor zoom 20-35mm f/2.8D AF or the 35-70mm
f/2.8D AF.
Other
zoom that in my experience performs well (even when
I forget the shade in my room and therefore flares)
is the AF 35-135mm f/3.5-4.5, introduced in 1986. (And
the 35-105mm is even better).
With it I took hundreds
of family pictures like the one at right, which I did
preset and was actually shot by a passing-by skier. |
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