What's a good method to autofocus on close subjects while shooting from the hip?

Question

Context

I like to take photos of dogs using a wide angle lens on a Canon 60d, with a fast shutter speed, AI servo mode and continuous shooting mode on. I'm usually holding the camera low to the ground and therefore I'm shooting from the hip so to speak and relying totally on the AF system. I always have used the center AF point because I like to control what I focus on, but I often times end up with photos where the dog is out of focus because it was off center and the center AF point wasn't covering it.

Question

Should I continue using the center AF point or should I use all of the AF points with the assumption that the dog, which will be the closest to the camera, will get focused on? Or should I be doing something else? I can't really do pre-focusing or manually select the focus point I want because usually the shooting environment is very chaotic (i.e., lots of dogs walking and running around).

Answer 1

Basically, yes, use all your focus points and hope for the best. I use center focusing quite a bit too, but when doing AI servo and continuous shooting it's hard to keep the center point on a moving target, so I often switch back to all focus points.

In your case, you definitely want all your focus points on. I don't know the exact algorithm it uses to decide what to focus on, but being closest is up there. If you're just using center focus, you'll have much lower chances because if you get just a little off it may not focus where you want. If you have all of them on, you've got a good chance it will focus on the closest thing, which is what you want. Of course, if you're too close, that could be a problem too, but I'll let you worry about that. :-)

Note, I also typically use back-button-focusing (not always), but in this case you're probably better off sticking to shutter button auto-focus.

Answer 2

Enable the AF-ON button in the settings menu to handle autofocus seperate from the button press.

It's a bit easier.

Try a fast shutter speed too....your shots might be in focus, but the shutter speed is too slow for a fast moving object.