3200 has stopped Auto-Focus'ing (odd quiet ticking)

Hello,

I'm wondering if anybody can help, I'm sure this is a case of, "You fool, you've slid 'X' button by mistake!", however we cannot fathom out what is going wrong!

Tonight my daughter was taking numerous pictures on Auto-Focus and Manual focus for her A-Level Work at College and mid-way through her Auto-Focus work it suddenly stopped taking pictures and the camera began to make a very quiet ticking sound when ever she attempted to take a picture. We switched to manual focus and it took pictures fine, switching back to Auto hoping it was resolved we discovered it wasn't, but the quiet ticking was this when the shutter button was pressed.

I searched on the web and discovered on these boards something similar however the issue was the Rangefinder was OFF, checking the camera, her's was off also but turning it ON didn't resolve the issue and nor did removing the battery for 10 minutes.

The SD card isn't full and the battery isn't flat.

Any idea what the issue could be before I contact Nikon? She has only had the camera since September this year (bought new).

Thank you.

Its sounds broke, but try taking the lens off and on a couple of times. maybe contacts are dirty. You shouldn't hear any clicking.

Were any settings messed with prior to this happening? There is an outside chance that autofocus could have been assigned to the ae/af lock button. In that case the camera would not focus with the shutter button, but you might hear a small sound from the lens VR mechanism when the shutter button is pressed. A quick test would be to push the ae/af lock button on the back of the camera to see if that makes it focus.

Clean the contact buttons on the lenses and body. And reset your user settings. Do you another a/f lenses you could try?

nickt I took the camera out and before I took the lens I tried the ae/af lock button and it was that, phew!

Thanks for the pointer! The eldest daughter and I are now sighing with a lot of relief

Great. If you haven't found it, the setting is in your menus somewhere, under buttons. The default is AE/AF lock. Probably best to leave it there until you are ready to try new techniques.