Can manual focus be faster than autofocus?

Question

Recently I've gotten into street photography, and I've noticed there are some situations where it is technically impossible to autofocus, to be precise, when you have moving objects and don't want to focus on the object that is closest to the camera. Picking a specific AF sensor would, obviously, be way too slow in this situation.

What I'm wondering is: Is it possible to train focussing manually so well that you can be sufficiently fast in these situation that you can focus correctly in these situations even with a wide aperture? Obviously, this would require a big viewfinder, a lot of manual-focussing training and a lot of composition training (you have to know what to focus on in order to actually focus). Can anybody of you do this? ;-)

Answer 1

Absolutely! And especially in street photography or low-light situations, you don't even need to be quick.

Say, you are shooting people walking along the sidewalk while you are sitting at a cafe across the street, you can pre-focus once and just snap away as interesting people walk by. Autofocus would try to refocus every time you took a shot, and that lag causes lost shots.

If you understand your aperture and shutter speeds well enough, you can also employ something called "hyperfocus" that allows you to control the depth of field and set a range of distances in which everything will be in focus.

And as for your Leica buddy, the photographer views the scene in a rangefinder through a different lens. So there is a tradeoff: while they might be able to focus more critically on distant objects (which are also more likely to be in focus anyway due to depth of field), they have more difficulty focusing on and composing close objects due to parallax (the viewfinder and lens see the scene from a different angles).

Answer 2

As with every skill it is quite useful to have the ability to work with manual focus properly. Especially low light situation can cause wrong or very slow auto-focusing, whereas a manual focus works squally fast in any situation.

Learn about the "Hyperfocal Distance" (Wikpedia Entry) that will give you some basic knowledge about getting sharp results in many situations.

Once you've got your head around this basic understanding of focusing, you have to get a feeling for each of your lenses, since they behave completely differently.

Grab your most used lens at first and try to find the point where things are the sharpest. work with non moving objects first. after you focused on an object, start altering your distance (move your feet) to this object. See and feel how the object gets out of focus, or does it become even sharper?

Work with aperture values > f8 first, since your DOF allows you more tolerance.

In the end it is all about practice. Don't forget: Some decades ago, no one had auto focus at all and this era produced some of the most stunning pictures ever made.

Answer 3

A couple of years ago, I met a guy who mostly shoots basketball for Sports Illustrated. From what he said, neither he nor any of his colleagues used autofocus at all. The trick, at least according to him, was that you had to get to the point of focusing without really using the viewfinder to check focus at all -- he simply "knew" where the focus ring needed to be for any given distance. He claimed (and I can believe it, after seeing him) that in most cases it wasn't even in focus yet when he hit the shutter release -- he was finishing focusing during the 1/10^th of a second (or so) between hitting the shutter release and the shutter actually opening.

The other side of it is, however, that being that good requires a level of fanaticism most of us will never even approach. I ran into him sitting in a bar having a drink -- but he had his camera with him, and picked it up, focused, and shot at least once every couple of minutes. From the way he acted, I'd almost bet he slept with the camera...

Answer 4

A lot will depend on your expectations in terms of accuracy, as well as the equipment you're using and mostly, of course, your own skill and the style of shooting you do.

Myself, I use manual focus most of the time, often on moving subjects. My results are admittedly somewhat inconsistent, but there are plenty of other reasons for that :-)

I found that in the past I was occasionally let down by slow AF in low light... since my old camera couldn't be set to always take a photo as soon as the shutter button was fully pressed, I found that there were times when I'd have rather had a slightly OOF shot that caught the moment, but that this was denied to me by factors somewhat out of my control...

I met a Leica rangefinder user, who as you might imagine has quite impassioned views on the benefits of manual focus. I now echo many of these sentiments.

One thing to be aware of is that the stock focus screens installed in most SLRs are not apparently able to correctly represent depth of field at apertures larger than F/2.8. So, no matter how good your vision and skills, this will be a limiting factor in your results with wide open fast lenses. It is possible to replace the screens for ones with manual focussing aids such as split prisms. In the past, I brought a cheap one of these from an ebay vendor and found that it was badly calibrated or otherwise faulty for use with my camera at the time; many people regard http://www.focusingscreen.com and KatzEye as being worth the cost (I'm considering buying a new one at some point).

Now that I'm in the practise of manually focussing regularly, I may or may not be as fast as the machine would be in a given situation, but I feel a closer connection with the subject and process, and rarely am I frustrated by my equipment. I also don't alert my subjects with the sound of AF motors; so even though at times I may take several seconds composing and framing a shot, people often comment that they find my photography very unobtrusive. I realise that supersonic AF motors might mitigate the acoustic effect, but I'm not too interested as I now feel that MF is fairly integral to my technique.

I do frequently set focus to the right approximate range before shooting as well, particularly if I feel like my subject might be a bit touchy...