Manual focus

[tycooder]

I read and article today on the advantages of prime lenses being sharper and manual focus producing better results. Im going to experiment with manual focus on my zoom lenses to see if I can do a better job than my auto focus.Here is a link The Prime Lens – Pros and Cons | Gear s-and-cons/



How many of you rely on auto focus or focus manually?

[SusanH1970]

Honestly I'm an autofocus kind of girl, but dammit you NAILED focus manually here! LOL I suspect it's easier to manual focus on an adult....try manually focusing on Seamus, Brendan. LOL!

Lovely photo. Her eyes are spectacular.

[MrJones]

Originally Posted by SusanH1970

Honestly I'm an autofocus kind of girl, but dammit you NAILED focus manually here! LOL I suspect it's easier to manual focus on an adult....try manually focusing on Seamus, Brendan. LOL!

Lovely photo. Her eyes are spectacular.

agreed. i can use manual focus when taking a portrait shot and a handled environment but not when I'm trying to catch a kid on the run
on the other hand, the autofocus can hardly get it too!

[wulf]

Manual almost all the time. Mind you, with the old lenses I'm using and the D40 body I've got no choice

To be honest, I'm happy with manual focus; for autofocus, you've still got to make sure the camera is working off the right point. The challenge with portrait photography is that you generally want the eyes to be sharp and a slight misaim with the camera could mean perfectly crisp eyebrows instead!

Wulf

[Mnaff]

I tend to do a lot of nighttime stuff so manual is my bread and butter, and even when shooting daylight or portrait. i tend to use manual, though i am usually trying to go for some crazy affect and auto just takes too long to get right.

[mitchcook]

Manual with a smaller aperture, helps make sure the focus seems fair even if I screw up and move back and forth a bit... However, working at f1.8 for portrait shots can definitely be crazy...!

[sk66]

Autofocus 95+% of the time...
Manual focus for critical shots with "stationary" subjects only.

[inkista]

Autofocus always when I have an AF-capable lens on the camera, unless I need to lock the focus for panorama stitching, I'm shooting with my fisheye lens, I'm shooting macros, or the AF is wonky, so I'll "touch up" manually if I'm using a USM lens with FTM (full-time manual focus).

But, obviously, manual focus if I'm using MF-only lenses. In that case, I'm probably focusing by eye with a non-standard focus screen and/or AF-confirmation about 70% of the time, and zone focusing (I.e., focusing by guesstimating distance and then setting the lens by the distance scale) or stopping down and using DoF scale/calculator 10% of the time, and the remaining 20% of the time, I'm using liveview with 10x magnification to nail critical focus.