[Leica] Re: Greg Bicket's focus thread

[Dave Jenkins <djphoto@vol.com>]

"This, to me, is why autofocus is useless to the photographer-artist,
commercial/illustrative photographer, amateurs who want to control what
gets put on the film, etc."

To state it as politely as possible, balogna.

Autofocus is an extremely useful tool for the precisely the above-named
types of photographers. As a 30-year
commercial/illustrative photographer whose book, Rock City Barns: A
Passing Era won the Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal
as art book of the year in 1997 (look it up at amazon.com), I use
Canon's Custom Function 4 to make my EOS A2s into
electronic Leicas. Simply disable all focus points except the center
one, point that at whatever you want to be in sharpest
focus, press the thumb button, and release it. Focus is locked on that
point until such time as you are ready to focus on
something else. You can shoot as much as you like, bracket exposures to
your heart's content, and the focus stays right where
you put it.

When aging eyes forced a move to autofocus in the early 90s, I first
tried Nikon for about a year. The
focus-hold-down-the-shutter-release-reframe-and-shoot dance drove me up
the wall, and the 8008s and 6006 Nikons hunted
for focus like a pack of hound dogs. Then I learned about Canon's Custom
Function 4. My first EOS locked on focus like a
bulldog, and I've never looked back.

I don't use auto-exposure much, preferring to get my information from a
Minolta incident meter. But autofocus is a wonderful
creative tool if you're the decision maker and not the camera. If your
autofocus system doesn't allow you to control what goes
on the film, you have the wrong AF system.

Dave Jenkins