Take a look at the four images of a Northern Waterthrush below:
As you can see, in the first shot the bird is in focus then the next two shots are out of focus, then it is in focus again. What happened? As much as I would like to blame the camera, I messed up. Yes, as I wrote a couple of days ago the Canon R7 has a designed limitation in its autofocus software which sometimes causes the camera to lose focus. But that was not the case in this instance. Instead, I was trying to focus too much.
I use back-button focus, which means every time I hit the button I’ve assigned to initiate focus the camera seeks an object to focus on. In the first shot I got a good focus; but then I hit the focus button again (trying to get a “better” focus) and this time the camera focused on the leaves in front of the bird for a couple of shots. I then hit the focus button again and it refocused on the bird. So what should I have done? After hitting the focus button and attained a good focus on the bird I shouldn’t have hit the focus button again. There was no need to keep hitting the focus button once the focus was on the same plane as the bird (unless the distance between the camera and the bird changed). Continually hitting the focus button increases the chance that the camera will find something other than the bird to focus on (as a corollary, using the shutter button as the focus button does just that which is why I use back-button focus).
So in conclusion, focus on the bird and then stop trying to get a “better” focus – chances are you’ll end up with a “worse” focus.
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