Wingpilot wrote:
I'd say it's definitely a camera problem. Or is it? Have done a lens calibration test to determine if you have a front or back focusing issue? If that is not an issue, or if you can't manually focus in live view, then there is a problem with the camera's AF function. If you set up for a lens calibration and you can't find a focus point on the ruler scale, this should confirm a camera problem, and should that be the case, even the best lens in the world won't focus.
wingpilot, if it is a camera problem, then i should think i would routinely see bad focusing. but i'm only seeing it in low dynamic range settings. all the other location images, all of which were high contrast conditions, came out beautifully. but i will investigate this more with these suggestions during this coming week. tomorrow's forecast is rain & snow, so the conditions should be good for low contrast scenes.