ASK COREY: How do I reprogram my autofocus for sports photography?

Corey,
I recently watched your creativeLIVE courses, and in one of your classes, “Make Great  Images with the Gear You’ve Got,” you talked about the AF-ON button. You reprogrammed it? Or what exactly did you do? You were holding it down to focus as opposed to depressing the shutter button halfway to focus (as I’m used to). I own a Nikon D7100 and I’m kinda new to all of this, but I was hoping you could take a minute to elaborate. Another note: I really love “DEDICATED,” the D4s promotional movie. It was very touching and it inspired me to become a dedicated photographer and moviemaker one day. Thanks.
Regards,
Vlad Sharov

 Hi Vlad, thanks for reaching out and thanks for that extra note about DEDICATED! Glad you’re inspired to get out there and make it happen.

You know, still photography is all about capturing those precise, decisive moments of time. This is especially true with sports photography. As the action speeds up, those moments become more elusive and harder to capture.

To capture any moment most decisively with your camera, two things need to happen: you need to focus your lens so that your subject is sharp and in focus, and you need to actuate the shutter button to tell the camera to freeze this exact moment of time.

For years sports photographers have struggled with the idea that both the autofocus and the shutter buttons were one in the same. You’d either depress the shutter halfway to try to focus on your subject and in doing so potentially miss the moment. Or you’d just depress the the shutter the whole way and hope that you camera was able to autofocus fast enough to get a sharp image—but more often than not, you’d end up with a blurry shot.

Separating those two actions makes a ton of sense, and most modern cameras allow you to do just that. Certainly, all Nikon HD-SLR cameras allow you to do that, including your D7100.

What I was referring to in my creativeLIVE course is reprogramming your AF-ON button, which is located on the back of your camera, to become your sole autofocus control button.

For reference, you can also program the AF-ON button so that both it and your shutter button activate the autofocus.

Go into your camera’s menu settings. Select the “Autofocus” menu. Now select “AF Activation.” Here you can choose between “AF-ON only” or “Shutter/AF-ON.”

I suggest selecting “AF-ON only.” This separates the autofocus from the shutter button, which is the goal for action photography. Now you’ll need to first depress the AF-ON button with your thumb to autofocus, and then use your trigger finger to depress the shutter button to capture that decisive moment.

It might take some time for you to get used to using two buttons to create images, but I think that once you’ve learned the technique, you’ll begin to see yourself capturing sharper, more decisive moments.