Author: Harry Guinness / Source: How-To Geek
Autofocus doesn’t always work as well as you’d hope. Sometimes it’s necessary to go old school and focus your camera manually. Here’s how to make sure you get sharp shots.
Autofocus is excellent on bright days when there’s a clear subject but, if you’re shooting in low light, want to focus on a specific object, or there isn’t a distinct subject, autofocus can struggle.
For landscape images, for example, I almost always use manual focus because it gives me total control over the image.The Basics of Manually Focusing
The simplest way to manually focus your lens is just to adjust the focus ring until whatever you are trying to capture is sharp.
Remember, the wider your aperture, the more accurate you’ll need to be, and when you’re focusing through your lens like this, your aperture is always wide open, even if you have it set to something else; it only closes up when you go to take a shot. To get a better idea of what’s actually in focus, you need to use the depth of field preview button.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a practical way to reliably get good shots unless you’re using a narrow aperture. Modern lenses and cameras work on the assumption that people are generally using autofocus, so it’s now much much harder to manually focus by eye than it was with older cameras. Lenses have shorter focal throw distances (the amount of movement required to adjust the focus), lack distance scales, and otherwise just aren’t designed to be quickly and easily focused manually through the viewfinder.
How to Manually Focus the Right Way
The good news is that there’s a great way to focus a modern camera set up manually.
It just requires a bit more time and, ideally, a tripod.Put your camera into Live View mode and if you can, mount it on a tripod. Live View shows a real-time preview, so the depth of field and brightness you see are pretty accurate.
Use the zoom to zoom in as close as you can on the subject you want to be in focus; my camera can go to 10x. The zoom buttons are in different place on different cameras but are almost always close to the Live View screen. This is also a digital preview zoom; it’s not zooming…
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