for the photography users: AF or MF?

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infinitynachos

New member
personally, i'm starting to hate 'AF' A LOT, takes time to focus on the thing you want, so now im starting to use MF and its wonderful :)
whats your opinion?
for all who don't know - AF= Auto Focus and MF= you guessed it, Manuel Focus
 
MF for things closer to the camera and for darker conditions. AF for things farther away and for times when I only have one hand free (happens a lot).
 
i mostly shoot concerts, so i pretty much need auto focus. the musicians usually jump around too fast for me to waste time on manual focus.
when i'm shooting other things where i actually have the time to use manual focus, i do.
so, both, depending on what i'm doing. haha.
 
I use manual focus for everything. Every lens that I own for all my 35mm SLR's are manual focus (I only buy/use manual focus film cameras), the 35mm rangefinders I own are MF, as are the Medium format cameras...

This has spilled onto my DSLR and the way I use it, I now have all my lenses switched to MF. I find it so much better to shoot MF because AF can not be relied on at times, especially in low light. It doesn't matter how expensive the lens it, there is not a single one out there that can AF in low light correctly, in this case MF is a must.

Depending on what kind of photography I am doing then I may use AF. I use it quite a lot for birds in flight, but that's about it. If I was into sports photography then I guess I would also use it for that.

It is not just down to personal preference, there are many reasons why MF is better. I often encourage people to give it a try for a week or two and nobody ever says that the experiment is a disaster, many prefer it.

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Depends on what type of photography your in to.
Portrait and where your working with a shallow depth of field and where you have time to set the picture up or where it's too dark for for the AF to pick up properly the manual certainly.
Sports and other action photography a good AF is a God send!
 
auto anything sucks

so im a MF guy, 95% of what i do AF is useless, the other 5% i trust myself more than a stupid camera - also im way faster at predictive focusing than any dumb camera
 
AF is definitely good for action shots, and for pictures of animals because you won't necessarily have time to MF. I would say i use Autofocus 80% of the time, and i use MF about 20% of the time. For portraits, i use both, and see which yields a better result. Each definitely has its place.
 
When i could see with acuity, I liked manual focus better. Also AF was hit and miss and *very* slow fifteen years ago. AF has improved a lot in recent years, and my vision has deteriorated so AF is necessary for me now. I tried to manually focus some Christmas portrait shots last year, and every one that I focused was soft, some terribly so. The AF shots were fine.
 
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