Camera will not focus and snap picture

chysmith

Hey Moose,
I bought the cheat cards and changed all of my settings for indoor portrait. No matter what I do my camera will not snap the picture. I don't know what I am doing wrong. HELP.

bruto

Check your auto focus settings. If your autofocus is set to single point, and if the scene is rather dark, it may have difficulty finding enough detail. Try focusing on an eye, but also make sure that your focus point has not moved. It is very easy on the D3200 to bump the control and inadvertently put the focus point off center. Push the "OK" button from time to time to recenter it. After many misfires and misfocusings from carelessness, I have taken to doing this almost automatically. The D3xxx operates in "focus priority" mode, which means that it will not take a picture unless it finds focus.

If you're shooting portraits, you can probably switch the AF to "auto area" which includes facial recognition. This should work unless there are too many unwanted faces that can confuse it.

Alternatively, if you find some detail that is the same distance from you as your subject, you can try focusing on that, and then recomposing with the shutter button half down.

Moose

Hey @chysmith - As @bruto mentioned, if it is extremely dark, the camera will have trouble focusing if it can't find some contrast to lock on to. Go ahead and email me (support "at" cameratips.com) with a little more detail about the situation, the subject and the type of light. If you can supply me with the original photo in question, I can take a look at the image data to see what went wrong. All the best!