>I didn't receive the message you're replying to here, but I feel moved to respond to some of the pronouncements in your post. Manual focus on the cameras is not merely a backup for autofocus, but has other useful applications. It enables you to place a point of focus in circumstances where the centrally placed AF sensor would be apt to set focus contrary to your intentions. Imagine a group of dancers moving about on an outdoor stage. Relying on AF, if you release the shutter when the figures in the scene are arranged just as you like in the frame, the sensor may be in a place where there is no figure, or subject, setting focus on some plane beyond: nice, sharp distant trees, blurry dancers. The focus-and-recompose technique is apt to be ineffectual here, as you want to press the shutter when the constantly-changing scene offers the compostion you want - the so-called decisive moment. This is but one case where the AF is indeed able to fix focus, but not necessarily in the zone where you want it. There are many other instances where using AF to establish a distance that can be read from the LCD panel and subsequently set on the MF dial will save you much grief and ruined pictures. Manually presetting exposure for stable prevailing conditions (and leaving it set there) from a single camera position is another technique that prevents the camera making "wrong" decisions for you. I find an incident meter or grey card useful for this. So I'd say I agree with you about not wanting a camera to make all the decisions for you, but an intuitive understanding of how the device works, and a methodology thought out beforehand is often a better way of working than thinking and calculating all the way through the process. Often, life won't wait for it, and depending on what type of photography you're doing, the deliberate, Ansel Adams way of working can be a real creativity-killer. I've noticed that when an athlete gives a stunning performance for the ages, someone will say, "oh my God, he was just unconscious!" I often wonder if photographers like Cartier-Bresson didn't work that way - so dialed-into the process, that he was able to keep thinking out of it and let intuition take over. Just my thoughts. Chas.
