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I was experimenting today changing the functionality of the AE/AF Button. Something that I kind of liked was setting it to AF-ON. Which meant that the shutter button no longer AFed with a half press, focusing would only occur when pressing the AE/AF Button. It's a shame though it's not in a more accessible spot. A trigger button under the shutter button would be nice.

kipper wrote:I was experimenting today changing the functionality of the AE/AF Button. Something that I kind of liked was setting it to AF-ON. Which meant that the shutter button no longer AFed with a half press, focusing would only occur when pressing the AE/AF Button. It's a shame though it's not in a more accessible spot. A trigger button under the shutter button would be nice.

Go with the D2 series, you'll have all

kipper wrote:I was experimenting today changing the functionality of the AE/AF Button. Something that I kind of liked was setting it to AF-ON. Which meant that the shutter button no longer AFed with a half press, focusing would only occur when pressing the AE/AF Button. It's a shame though it's not in a more accessible spot. A trigger button under the shutter button would be nice.

Agreed, would be a useful feature and the button is too far away for me to use it easily as well. The pain in the butt for me is that I often use AE-Lock when doing focus-recompose and I dont want to lose that functionality, so a seperate button would be great!
Yes Birdy, the D2x has it and nope, I cant justify spending that much moola on a camera, even though I would love too

I use the AE/AF button as the AF start button all the time ... the trick with it though is to use the auto focus mode in the AF-C setting rather than the AF-S, the reason being that the camera will not fire in the AF-S mode if the focus is not locked on.... by comparison, in the AF-C mode you can focus and then recompose and even if the focus point is not on the subject you can still fire the shutter. It's a great way of working and you never have to worry about missing the moment again!

G'day Daryl,
I always use the AE/AF button for focus... I find it very handy to be able to set focus and keep that focus easily by just keeping my thumb on the button and can re-compose to my hearts content... That also means that the exposure being set by the shutter means I can keep focus and only set exposure when I want to take the shot, catering for changing light until time when the image is taken...

Also, that means I don't accidentally keep taking shots and quickly deleting them while trying to just hold the shutter down lightly... Also it's handy with VR lenses as they seem to use the suhtter for VR activation...

I find it handy to seperate focus and exposure lock...

I use the AF-AE button for exposure only,

I then use the shutter button to get focus
recompose (in af-s mode only) and shoot

It means I can seperate the af from ae so i can meter hold the ae-af button focus hold the shutter, recompose shoot.


I am sure this gets the most out of the button combinations...

You guys are lucky to ba able to use these buttons. I wear glasses and hardly can see with the right eye, so I have to use the left one which makes it very awkward to use the multi-selector or AE/AF lock button. The advantage of wearing glasses is that I do not poke myself in the eye everytime I use the camera ( See...no qualifier!).
Cheers,
Gerard