Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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When do you use manual focus? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by DiablolicalScientist@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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I feel like autofocus is so good. Are there times that you use manual focus? When I am looking through the view finder it almost seems impossible to actually manual focus a shot anyway.

Am I doing something wrong here? Just checking. Thank you.

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[–] RedHuey@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I use manual focus as much as practical. Certainly whenever I am doing close or macro shots. Or shots where I don’t feel like fighting the camera to get what I want.

But the issue is that manufacturers don’t want to using manual focus. They give you the possibility, pretending to be magnanimous, but then they remove the things that made it easy back before 1985. Most modern lenses don’t really have easy to use focus rings, and the camera viewfinders make it by default difficult to judge focus. And on mine, if the camera is set to use AF, if I turn it off by an override button, it will turn it on again after a time. Annoying.

That said, I use focus peaking, set pretty high, to help.