I seem to be having trouble using the eye control focus on my EOS30 when I use my macro lens close up. If I try to focus on a flower the camera has trouble knowing which point I am looking at. Eye control works ok in normal photography (ie. not macro). I ended up having to select the centre point(which is what I used to do with my EOS300. Is this normal, or is there any way I can calibrate for macro?

Cheers. Sarah

-- Sarah Needham (sarah.needham1@orange.net), April 24, 2002

Answers

You can try a separate calibration for macro work, but in my opinion macro work is best served with manual focus. I noticed that my 180/3.5 Sigma macro hunts a lot when focussing at a short distance, this seems to be consistant with remarks at www.photograpyreview.com. I never made a point of it and use MF for macro work.

-- Jos van Eekelen (jos@compuserve.com), April 24, 2002.

I don't own a macro lens but I always turn off autofocus when shooting close-ups with a supplementary diopter or an extension tube. I've found this is a simpler method of doing very close photos with any of my EOS bodies.

-- Lee (Leemarthakiri@sport.rr.com), April 24, 2002.

Or another possibility: calibrate it a few times when you're set up for macro work. I don't do macro and I don't have that lens, but I have found that (for example) calibrating in bright light doesn't do much for ECF's accuracy in the dark. But calibration, if done on the same setting #, is cumulative, and calibrating under different conditions can improve its accuracy; when I took my same calibration setting into a dark room and ran through the calibration process again, it magically improved ECf's accuracy in the dark without hurting its accuracy in the light. Maybe the same would apply for you.

-- Steve Dunn (steved@ussinc.com), April 25, 2002.

I just tried my EOS 3 with the 50 EF macro, and the eye control works just fine. Maybe you just need to calibrate some more.....

I always manual focus for close-up work also, but the ECF does seem to work just fine.

-- J.Horton (masssalt@yahoo.com), April 28, 2002.