Focus assist?

[Phill D]

Just a quick question about the focus assist light on the FZ20. I was recently doing some close up shots of a spider & it had got pretty dark so I was using the flash. I found that the focus assist lamp could be pretty usefull in showing me the shot briefly as the EVF was black without it. Anyway what I noticed was that the pool of light the assist lamp made was actually not in the centre of the image. In fact often probably only about half of the frame was illuminated. So the question is what spot is the assist lamp operating on & why does it appear not to be the centre spot as I was operating in spot AF mode? Does my camera's focus need setting up somehow?

[genece]

If you had an adapter on it seems to block some of the light. Mine is dead center.

MAybe your thumb got in the way.

[Phill D]

Thanks Genece I checked & luckilly for my street cred it wasn't my thumb but it could easilly have been as I hadn't thought of that thanks. I don't have any adaptors etc so not that either. I have done a bit more investigation & it looks to me that this is just the way it is. The position of the lamp & the lense means that when you get close to a subject a small amount of the focus assist light is cut off & that is what I was seeing. I took a few shakey hand held images to illustrate with my old Olympus C40Z at a few different distances. The spot focus point position in relation to the focus assist pool of light was interesting. For my camera it was not in dead centre but at 10ft away it was at the bottom edge of the pool of orange light. At reducing distances (tried 2ft & 1ft) it seemed to have moved slightly anticlockwise to about the 25past position but was still at the edge of the light pool. At 3 inches distance the light cut off by the lense still seems to be a similar proportion and is still pretty small so too be honest I suspect this is probably not an issue at all just a curiosity. What I wasn't sure about was at the 3 inch distance the spot focus position had moved well into the lense shadow position. This may mean that at close macro distances when the light is poor then the focus assist lamp is not realy assisting & manual is the best resort. I guess most of this is common sense when you think about it but as I had raised the issue I felt I ought to follow up a bit. The attached image was of my FZ20 at about 1ft from a wall showing the pool of focus assist light & the cut off by the lense.