rook2c4 wrote:
The focus-recompose approach works just me; fiddling with multiple focus points only slows me down. I suppose if I shot birds in the sky or had my camera mounted on a tripod, selecting focus points would be more efficient. But I rarely do either.
Rook, we all shoot within the confines of the limits of our cameras, or our abilities. That has to be the lowest common denominator. MOST, people use the central point for a reason....., it's the ONLY cross point on most inexpensive or older cameras. So it's the only point that is reliable enough to lock good focus. AND, if you enable ALL the points, now it's a crap shoot, since many cameras will just lock to the area of highest contrast and focus there, but that may not be where YOU wanted the focus to be.
If you are focusing on whole body shots of people standing around, such as at a wedding on central point, that puts the head in the center and the feet at the bottom of the frame. So what's in the whole top half?? Nothing after you crop off 50% of your pixels!!
One of my cameras has tons of focus points and ALL are cross type. It also has focus point Auto Orientation. What's that? I can pick a point at the top off the frame in portrait orientation and put that point on people's eye, ensuring the eye is always in focus and at the top of the frame. But to shoot a wide group of people, I simply rotate the camera to landscape and my focus point automatically shifts to the same location in the frame but on landscape mode. That point is still at the top of my screen and on the eyes and I sometimes don't need to crop at all.
That same configuration works for me for sports, portraits, birds etc.
One learns not to fear a miss-focus because you are not on the sensitive center point all the time, since all the points are sensitive.
If you ever shoot with lenses using only 1" of DoF, Recomposing gets extremely critical really quick, if not impossible. Rook, I don't recall the last time my camera was on a tripod either, nor do I recall the last time I had my camera on central point either.
And if all you shoot are landscapes, any point will do, as usually everything is at infinity anyway.
When I first started I too used just central point, but today's cameras are WAY beyond that for those wishing to improve their photography by taking advantage of the new technologies!! ;-)
SS