The Original Email

Dear SPT team,

I came across your software online, while searching for a solution to an autofocus problem that I have with my Canon R7 camera. When used with my Canon EF100-400 f4.5-5.6 lens (version I, not version II), it front focuses significantly. I see this in the bird photography that I do, and I confirmed it with tripod-mounted photos of a focus calibration standard. I don’t understand why this is happening, as the mirrorless cameras shouldn’t be prone to this problem. Anyway, I saw that your software allows one to adjust the autofocus of a given camera/lens combination, to ensure that the autofocus works as intended.

I am keen to find someone locally who can provide this service, but the shops that I have approached so far do not seem to be able to do so. Would you be able to advise of any camera repair shops in Australia (in Brisbane, Queensland would be ideal, but I can mail it interstate if need be) that have purchased this software from you?

If there aren’t any shops using your software locally that I can take or send this to, is the process simple enough for an intelligent person without hardware repair experience to manage? I don’t want to pull the camera apart, but if it is a software solution, potentially with an iterative process to get the optimal focus using a calibration chart, I could probably manage that.

OK, I hope you can help me out here. Manually focusing to take sharp images is becoming very annoying. 

Cheers,

Jamie Riches

The Follow Up

Hi Chuck,

By all means use the information as a testimonial. I'm happy that it worked out and I'd like others to know that it can do this as well.

So much of what I read when trying to diagnose this problem said that it was impossible, that it couldn't happen with mirrorless systems, that it was something I was doing wrong, and that companies that claimed it could happen were just trying to sell their software (that one was about Reikan).

I wish I had gotten the focus target set up earlier and just demonstrated it to my own satisfaction. The 10X increase in keepers sounds like a lot, but the lens autofocus was quite precise before - so the images were grouped nicely but almost all were too far front focussed to be good. In the end I just switched to manually focusing. I still miss some now after the adjustment, but this is for normal reasons, like focusing on a twig in front of the object. 

OK, thanks again for the software. I'm not sure if I'll need to use it again, but it was well worth purchasing just to solve this problem. 

"The autofocus calibration process was, as you said, pretty straightforward to follow."

Cheers,

Jamie