Enthusiast photographer here too. Have you tried using Bluetooth shutter remote instead?
I have one but its one of those cheapo ones that come with the selfie sticks, have to see how it fares. IMO the headset shutter method seems to be more reliable in registering shutter presses.
Just tried it using FV5, auto focus looks fine to me, was just very slow and inconsistent, this may be the reason for the out of focus.
Try to 'stress test' it
Switch to full manual mode, keep the autofocus at AF while setting your manual ISO and manual shutter time. It will fail to get a focus lock. If you try to exit the app, it may crash. Happens to me on Camera FV5 and Opencamera and it happens to ALL focus modes except manual focus.
I also experimented with other apps
Proshot - when shooting full manual, tap to focus doesnt work, it focuses by itself, not necessarily on where you want it to. I
really hate this app on the G6 by the way as it has one very irritating issue whereby if you launch the app while phone is in landscape mode, everything is in 90 degrees till you re-orient the phone, then it starts to follow orientation
Footej - I cant seem to find manual focus on this app. Strangely this is the one 3rd party app where AF works when shooting full manual. However it lacks LG's long exposure shutter times (it maxes out at 1s)
Manual Camera (by geeky devs studio) - 'seems' to have no issue though i cant confirm due to rare use (i dont like using camera apps that have no save-to-microSD option and this is one of them). Regardless, no headset shutter support means theres no way Im using this for fireworks anyway, even if its focusing is ok
A Better Camera - manual mode buggy as hell on G6, even worse than Proshot. When going to camera roll and attempt to go back to viewfinder, whole viewfinder is black
I guess as much as I 'kinda' like LG's cameras for their control, their camera drivers seem to be quite unfriendly to 3rd party apps. I remember in the G4, white balance control didnt work on any 3rd party app, and long exposure shutter times only available from a certain software update onwards (6+ months after launch), and even then if you shot anything exceeding 1.0s, EXIF data will fail to save the shutter speed (FYI this problem is still happening on the G6 for all 3rd party apps)
in spite of all that, the G4 was still competent enough that I brought it to
three NDP rehearsals to try photographing fireworks and it was even my 1st time I ever tried fireworks
https://i.imgur.com/vFeCUrE.jpg
I dont expect the G6 to beat the G4 honestly since for long exposure, their image quality difference should almost similar and both lenses are equally fast (in fact the G4 has a bigger sensor) but I still want to try it, maybe even with the wide angle lens too, which G4 lack
Just tried again with FV5 in low light. It couldn't even take the picture, because it couldn't focus. The issue may be related with the viewfinder which still looked very dark even though I have lowered the shutter speed, i.e., using LG cam, with the same shutter speed, the viewfinder lighted up, but not in FV5.
Think it has to do with how the app renders the viewfinder
Some apps like to have their viewfinder frame rate match the shutter speed, which may be intend to give a realistic depiction of what the photo will look like, but of course when you set a long shutter time, the viewfinder will freeze as its frame rate is as slow as the shutter time.
Both FV5 and LG app avoid this trap by having their viewfinder refresh rate never go slower than a certain limit (think its around 1/10s) even if your shutter is slower than that limit.
The difference is that LG will still crank up ISO for the view finder. You can observe this in a well lit room, ISO50 and 30s shutter on the LG app gives a nearly pure white viewfinder but in FV5 you can sort of still see things.
And yea the tradeoff is that FV5 will have a super dark viewfinder as a result when you are shooting low light long exposure. It was like that for the G4 too at last year NDP rehearsal, I literally have to make the ISO as 800 so I can see the view, then I frame the shot and dial the ISO back to 50, because FV5 viewfinder was so dark (remember for fireworks theres a ND filter in front of lens so even less light goes in)
...by the way for the wide angle camera, OpenCamera is the only 3rd party app that is even able to access it. All others can't.
