Since switching to a mirrorless system, my approach to using my camera has changed quite a bit. If you've been listening to the podcast, you know that I used to recommend using wide area focus, where you are pretty much allowing the camera to decide what to focus on. The reason I recommended that was simple. Most of the time, the camera did a great job of choosing the right subject to focus on. It saved me a ton of time and effort compared to spot focus, where I had to manually choose the focus point all the time.
With wide area, I only had to step in about 10 or 15% of the time, which made everything so much easier and faster. Rather than using single focus points, where I would have to dictate the focus area 100% of the time. But when I switched to the Canon mirrorless, I ran into a problem. My DSLR wide area focus covered about 75% of the frame, which was fine because most of the time the subject I wanted to focus on was inside that area. The issue with my new mirrorless camera is that it's covering about 90 or 95% of the frame, and the edges of the frame are pretty much as sensitive as the center. So now, when something small comes in on the edge, like a leaf, the edge of a fence, or a rock, the camera starts to focus on that instead of the subject I actually wanna capture, which is a little bit closer to the center. That's been a problem for me.
So wide area focus isn't working as well for my style of shooting anymore. Now I'm switching to a smaller focus area and having to take more time to control where the camera focuses. Fortunately, with the Canon R5 Mark II, I have eye control autofocus, which makes the process a lot easier and more precise. Do note that if you're shooting action, mirrorless is definitely more advantageous than DSLR by a long shot due to face detection and object detection technologies. As a result, that wide area focus or spot focus isn't actually necessary.
If you're curious about how your camera decides what to focus on, I'd recommend checking out episode 120 for a deeper dive into understanding your camera's focusing system.
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