Here is how to register the bride and groom to have a Sony automatically focus on them in a crowd

Wedding photographers, this the feature you’ve all been waiting for. The new cameras from Sony have a nifty feature that allows you to register a face and then tell the camera to look for a specific face and then try and find them in the frame and force focus on them.

This feature works by first shooting the persons you want to have priority with (say the bride and the groom), and then telling the camera to look for those faces. You can also set the priority in which the camera looks for each of the persons.

So you can, for example have the camera look for the bride, and if the bride is not found, to look for the groom, the mothers, fathers and so on, up to eight different face.

Gary Fong has a quick primer on how to set this on a Sony a6300, but I have done the same with my A7ii, and face registration is listed as a feature with many other new Sony mirrorless cameras which are becoming more popular with wedding photographers.

Here is the summary of how to enable this feature

1 – in the camera menu, go to the setting menu, and select Face Registration

2 – Press New Registration

3 – take a shot of your priority subject inside the frame

4 – now, go to the camera menu and select Smile / Face Detect

5 – Enable face detection with registered faces

You are done. From now on, the camera will look for the faces you registered (in order of priority) and try and focus on them.

This can come quite handy if you are shooting your child in a group or if you are shooting a wedding. Some reports on the web claim that this feature will front focus, however, this was not the case with my camera.

[Face Registration and Order Exchange | Gary Fong  via reddit]