Manual Focus - How to actually select Infinity -

[swb_mct]

So I had my first venture out at night to shoot "city lights" . lots of cars and street lights. Like others have found auto-focus doesn't work at night on the Mavic even when there are many precise bright objects in a dark background.

So just like my old SLR, Infinity would be perfect for a subject > or = to 500 feet away but on the Mavic App the "Flowers <> Infinity" scroll wheel has Infinity somewhere in the middle, not at one end or the other.

I could try to find a clear position on the scroll-wheel by looking at my screen, but how is that going to help for a movie that will displayed many times larger than my mobile screen. It would be a guess at best when plain-old Infinity is all that's needed.

I saw another post where someone answered this question something like "if you know anything about lenses you would know infinity isn't an absolute with any lens because of all sorts of stuff about depth of field, aperture, sensor speed etc",

But my cell phone and every camera I have ever used had an infinity setting natively or when in manual mode. The absolute setting of "Infinity" on other cameras has always worked for me for landscape photos regardless of other settings or conditions. Certainly better than trying to guess the best setting looking at an image on an iPhone screen.

 

[Robert Mitchell]

Best I could suggest is, determine during good light, exactly where infinity is on the scale, and then use that setting going forward.

Also, if you set the Mavic on a still surface allowing you to see a distant lighted object, you can get the setting pretty much spot on, while it's stationary. Harder to do when in the air.

 

[swb_mct]

Best I could suggest is, determine during good light, exactly where infinity is on the scale, and then use that setting going forward.

Also, if you set the Mavic on a still surface allowing you to see a distant lighted object, you can get the setting pretty much spot on, while it's stationary. Harder to do when in the air.

Right, or I was thinking about finding the "infinity" setting by trial and error viewing the actual image recorded on the chip, but there is no way to recover your best setting after the next Mavic restart. The best I can come up with is to load the app onto a full size ipad to tune the camera before each night flight. then switch back to my phone or iPad mini before takeoff. That may not work because you might loose the setting when you change over to the other mobile device.

Enough people have this problem that it would be great if they could do something to address this. Even putting numbers on the Flowers <> Infinity wheel would let people return to their best setting.

 

[Mossiback]

One trick is to zoom in (2x digital), adjust focus, then zoom out and capture image. It makes it easier to make fine focus adjustments.

 

[swb_mct]

One trick is to zoom in (2x digital), adjust focus, then zoom out and capture image. It makes it easier to make fine focus adjustments.

That's a great suggestion . . Thanks

 

[Hauptmann]

I've had that problem as well, which I hope is addressed with the Mavic II, or whatever. That is if we live that long .

 

[cmguss]

To find infinity on the drone, switch to manual mode and hit the infinity icon once and its set. Its pretty simple and I use manual mode/infinity every time I fly. The scroll wheel may not indicate its at infinity (which is odd), but it is. You can actually lock the focus beyond infinity for some strange reason. I'm not sure how that would ever be used by anyone.

 

[Ghaz75]

So I had my first venture out at night to shoot "city lights" . lots of cars and street lights. Like others have found auto-focus doesn't work at night on the Mavic even when there are many precise bright objects in a dark background.

So just like my old SLR, Infinity would be perfect for a subject > or = to 500 feet away but on the Mavic App the "Flowers <> Infinity" scroll wheel has Infinity somewhere in the middle, not at one end or the other.

I could try to find a clear position on the scroll-wheel by looking at my screen, but how is that going to help for a movie that will displayed many times larger than my mobile screen. It would be a guess at best when plain-old Infinity is all that's needed.

I saw another post where someone answered this question something like "if you know anything about lenses you would know infinity isn't an absolute with any lens because of all sorts of stuff about depth of field, aperture, sensor speed etc",

But my cell phone and every camera I have ever used had an infinity setting natively or when in manual mode. The absolute setting of "Infinity" on other cameras has always worked for me for landscape photos regardless of other settings or conditions. Certainly better than trying to guess the best setting looking at an image on an iPhone screen.

Hi Dear! Coz I am into astrophotography and tested my Mavic Pro Platinum to shoot stars at night so Here is a trick I found to adjust the lens at infinity using the app in MF. You just have to make it hover on a suitable altitude away from city lights and lens pointing upward (gimbal can go 30 deg up in the settings). Now pick MF mode and then scroll the MF dial on app screen fully upward so that macro sign is faded and infinity sign is bright white. You would have noticed small horizontal lines on the MF dial. So now carefully start scrolling down slowly the MF dial and bring down 28 lines and then try to shoot stars at ISO 400 and slowing down shutter speed to 8 secs. This will definitely give you good result. You can use this 28 lines formula in video mode as well with high shutter speed.

 

[Robert Mitchell]

Hi Dear! Coz I am into astrophotography and tested my Mavic Pro Platinum to shoot stars at night so Here is a trick I found to adjust the lens at infinity using the app in MF. You just have to make it hover on a suitable altitude away from city lights and lens pointing upward (gimbal can go 30 deg up in the settings). Now pick MF mode and then scroll the MF dial on app screen fully upward so that macro sign is faded and infinity sign is bright white. You would have noticed small horizontal lines on the MF dial. So now carefully start scrolling down slowly the MF dial and bring down 28 lines and then try to shoot stars at ISO 400 and slowing down shutter speed to 8 secs. This will definitely give you good result. You can use this 28 lines formula in video mode as well with high shutter speed.

Good method. I used this also and found it to be 32 lines.