Hello Sylwester, Guess I'm with Shel on this one. My experience with AF is that it is either inprecise or that it tends to cause you to compose poorer than you would have using manual focus.
Here is my reasoning. The AF sensor (doesn't matter camera brand) is of a certain size. When the focal length changes, the area covered by the sensor changes. It is entirely possible and quite probable that many times, the sensor covers an area that has depth to it. Now in that situation, the exact focus point can be arbitrarily somewhere in the sensor area and on top of that, somewhere in the area marked in the viewfinder. So what you get is a picture that isn't focused exactly where you want it. For many people that is good enough - they don't care beyond that. For me, it is bothersome. My niece is a full-time working pro shooting multiple weddings weekly. Very large volume and has mostly been shooting a Nikon D1X. I have sat down and gone through quite a large number of her pictures and found that many times, the AF put the focus on part of the nose instead of the eyes, etc. In other words, the AF missed the precise spot. Something was focused, just not the desired location. When viewed small, the miss was not noticeable, but if the client asked for an 8X10, they would see it. If you subscribe to the focus lock on subject, then recompose style of AF (I do), then I find that I get lazy, especially in a quicker moving situation and end up having the subject more centered than I really want. I grew up on manual cameras like the OM-1 and MX. The style I shoot is meter, compose, focus, shoot. My images are much better when I do it that way. When shooting AF, it is more like set camera to program or AV, focus, compose, shoot - usually the metering is quite as good and the composition suffers because the AF point becomes more important than the composition. I guess I am saying that I consider AF to be a bad habit. I agree there are situations that should use AF, but weddings is not one of them. I guess we will have to disagree on this one. -- Best regards, Bruce Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 8:03:10 AM, you wrote: SP> Bruce Dayton wrote on 11.01.05 16:29: >> Boy, you have me confused. I have shot a lot of weddings, and I don't >> recall action shots being a part of it. If you can't focus follow someone >> walking down the aisle, then perhaps you might consider that action. >> I never use AF for weddings. SP> Bruce, it's all a matter of habbits. If I'm used to using AF in these SP> situations, than I shouldn't change my habbits should I? ;-)
