On Oct 28, 2013, at 8:27 AM, George Sinos <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:13 AM, Eric Weir <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Feeling guilty that I’m feeling tempted by autofocus. I want to learn >> photography. I don’t like things that do things for me without explaining >> what they’re doing. > > There is no special honor in focusing manually and there is nothing > mysterious about auto-focus if you turn off all but one of the > sensors.
Thanks, George. It’s a hangup of mine. > Focusing is a purely mechanical skill that has nothing to do with > making your photos better. Picking the place in the photo where you > want to focus is the skill. I agree with the second sentence. Though I’m the rankest amateur here, not so sure about the first. But maybe that just proves my amateur status > If you set the camera to use a single focusing sensor, then lock the > focus so you can recompose the image, you're not doing anything > significantly different than when we used to manually focus in the old > days. Even then we usually had help from a split image or micro-prism > spot that would help us achieve better focus. Those tools do not > exist on today's cameras. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it a try when I get an autofocus lens. Chances are good. > > Take advantage of the cameras features that can give you more time to > concentrate on what is important. > > I've reached an age where I am quite thankful for auto-focus. If I had > to depend on my eyesight I would only have sharp photos by accident. I’m probably older than you, and it’s occurred to me that I could use up a lot of the time left to me learning how to focus manually. However, as I say, I do have the hangup. And though I’m ancient, my eyesight is excellent. No restriction my drivers license. Regards, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Weir Decatur, GA USA [email protected] "Any assurance economists pretend to with regard to cause and effect is merely a pose." - Emanuel Derman -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
