X-H2s : Face Tracking

Having had the H2s for a fair while now and having “hammered” it in Cannes on the Red Carpet, I thought I would give some thoughts…

The above image shows the balance of images I kept (filed to press) over the 2 week festival, with the numbers shot on each camera & lens. (The images were shot during photocalls and on the Red Carpet). In case you are not aware how the Cannes red carpet is laid out, here is an image..

You can see the carpet is between 2 opposing set of photographers, so that is a lot of faces for the face tracking to lock onto when the only one you want , is the main subject!

Most nights on the carpet I was coupling the X-H2s with the 56/1.2 aiming to create atmospheric images of the talent, trying to catch other photographers strobes along with more natural faces & movement, such as these of Adriana Lima..

As always, click to expand the image(s)..

Most of the time, the most natural expressions are as the subject moves between poses or locations on the carpet. Once stationary, the Red Carpet Face comes out.

So, how did the face tracking do?

With this camera/lens combination, at these ranges, the focusing was fast and snappy. Eyes were (mostly) tracked with no issues at all . 95% of the time I was shooting with AF-C in short bursts of 10 frames a second (to catch strobes). When the subject was stationary these would all be in focus (no focus hunting like earlier cameras).

To be fair, the story was similar with moving subjects, no hunting but occasionally 1 or 2 frames would miss focus. I think this was more down to lighting & conditions rather than the tracking alone. Most of the time it would re-lock quickly…… but….. there are issues.

For example when the subject turned away (the face no longer being visible), the camera would not always revert to the body of the subject, it might jump a face in the crowd of photographers behind (a distance of 2 or 3 metres).

And then there was….

In the frame above the camera has just lost focus on the main subject. It may have jumped to the photographers behind, it may have jumped forward, even though the subject was blocked for less than a second.

If it did jump to a face in the distance, getting the lock back on the required subject’s face was not always easy, the only guaranteed fast method I came up with was:

• Tap the front Fn key (set to enable / disable face tracking)
• Position the focus point over the subject face (move camera)
• Half-press to lock focus (no tracking)
• Tap the front Fn key to re-enable face tracking

This is actually very fluid, with my middle finger taping the Fn2 button (item 20 in the image below)

The other real issue I found is when the system was recognising 4 or 5 faces in the image. In theory it is possible to flick left and right to select the required subject but this was not quite reliable enough. Then as you managed to select the required face, it looked away, the system switched back to an adjacent face.

These experiences left me feeling that the object / face tracking could do with it’s own set of parameters much like the AF-C Custom Settings. (Particularly the Zone switching & ignore obstacles).

In fact – it could probably just obey these single set of settings (this is where I get corrected that this is how it works, or is supposed to). I was shown a competitors system which once it locked on to a particular face , it stayed with that face…

The tracking is fast, being head & shoulders above the previous Fuji systems. It is probably on par with the competitors speed-wise (or thereabouts for the subjects I shoot) but could it be better? Well we always want it faster …. 😉

It may well be my settings but with the number of people I have photographed using this camera probably being in excess of 10k now, the settings I am using now seem to to get the most consistent results. (I’ll add them to a “settings” page later this week).

Anyway, I have rambled on enough now so here are a few more images shot in this way to close out the post.

As ever, any comments or thoughts, please post them below (not on social media – it helps the ranking).

Thank you..