Let me ask you an important question. When you are taking photographs how much time to you give to thinking about where the point of focus should be?

I am convinced that the more sophisticated our cameras are the lazier we become. Very few people I talk to seem to give any thought to where the point of focus should be. Even worse, the cameras themselves seem to encourage this behaviour whilst at the same time reducing the control the user has over the point of focus.

I still have a Canon EOS3 which I use from time to time. This is a wonderful camera to use, especially as it has a wide range of focus points (I think there are about 45) rather than the usual 9 we seem to have become used to. Best of all is the eye control feature which allows you to select the point of focus just by looking at it.

Why then do I think this is so vital? Think of shooting a portrait where you need a shallow depth of field to emphasise the subject. If you don’t get the point of focus on the eyes the image will immediately lose something. Think of shooting a Landscape where you want the image to have great depth of field whilst retaining a natural field. If you don’t take care to select the right point of focus you won’t achieve maximum sharpness and may end up with the distant objects appearing sharper than the foreground