If you don’t have time to sit and read your entire manual through from cover to cover, here is a topic to look for in the index and single out: how do you set your camera’s focus point? If you leave your camera in the “auto mode” all of the time, you don’t have to think about this one at all. Your camera does it for you, generally picking the points that are closest to the camera as your focus point. Dare to break out of the “auto”. Put your camera in “aperture priority mode” (AV for those Canon shooters out there.) and use your just-read-my-manual knowledge to set your focus point to the place that you want to be the most clear in your photo. With my Canon T2i, it means using the buttons on the back of the camera to place a red dot on my “sweet shot spot” to get my camera to focus on that point. Take lots of pictures of the same thing to see how moving the focus point around would change things in your picture. When taking shots of people, generally speaking you should “shoot them between the eyes” to get the great facial focus so many people desire. Same goes for photos of pets. If it has eyes, shoot between them. To illustrate my point, I took several photos of a beautiful butterfly while it was resting on a windowsill. Look at the gallery below. Each shot has one point that is in better focus than the others. This is where I put my focus point. It all depends on what you’re looking for in your picture. This wing in focus, that wing in focus, the whole butterfly, you get to choose.
