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I've been using the Sony A7r for a few days. I mostly do landscape and street photography, but I enjoy studio/modeling as well.

With modeling I normally use the focus and recompose technique, because manual focus is too slow in a studio environment.

With the Sony there is an option for point focus. However, the rectangle seems to be a little bit too big if compared to the focus points of Nikon/Canon DSLRs.

If I wanted to focus over the eye, how accurate would that be?

And are there other/better techniques?

zzzbbx
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  • The autofocus accuracy over the eye depends on many factors. How far away from your subject are you standing, what focal length are you using, what is the maximum aperture of the lens, what kind of lighting do you have when focusing etc. Also I wonder what kind of studio work you're doing since to me studio work is usually the kind of work where you've got time to mark the floor where the subject shall stand and manually focus. – Hugo Mar 20 '15 at 08:13
  • The actual area of sensitivity is often much larger than those smaller focus points in Nikon and canon viewfinders. See http://photo.stackexchange.com/q/38741/15871 – Michael C Mar 22 '15 at 01:48

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You can change the size of the AF rectangle, there are three settings, small medium and large. The small setting is comparable to the single AF points you get with a DSLR so you should be fine with that.

If you want to specifically focus on someone eye you can go one better - your A7R has an "eye detect" focus mode which will locate and focus on your subjects eye for you. It works pretty well but you have to configure and hold down one of the custom buttons C1,2,3 for it to work, which can be tricky.

This page describes how to set up eye focusing:

http://sonyalphalab.com/forums/showthread.php?362-Sony-A7-and-Eye-AF-Feature-Help

Matt Grum
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  • hi Matt, thanks for the info. I didn't know you would change the size of the rectangle. I will take a look into eye detect too. Thank you, – zzzbbx Mar 20 '15 at 15:44