In the second part of our mini-series “Easily Confused”, we pick up on an observation from our beginner courses. Many participants confuse exposure mode and focus. Very often they think that in manual exposure mode you also have to focus manually. Or the other way around.

Where does the confusion come from?

Since manual exposure mode is usually abbreviated to M and manual focus is abbreviated to MF, it is perhaps natural to associate these two things. Still, I find it surprising that this connection is so often made by newcomers to photography. I believe that this phenomenon is related to autofocus. After all, before there were autofocus cameras, no one thought of making a connection between the exposure mode and focusing. After all, focusing was always done by hand, both in manual exposure mode and in (semi-)automatic exposure modes. Obviously, technical progress (I no longer want to work without autofocus) sometimes contributes to the confusion of the user …

Autofocus is king

In my personal experience, the autofocus of a modern camera is so precise and, above all, so fast that I simply can’t keep up with it manually. And that’s not just due to increasing age. So the default setting of our lenses is AF, completely independent of the exposure mode. Of course, also in manual exposure mode, but I use that extremely rarely (even if I repeat myself: If you have understood the basics of photography, you will reach your goal faster and more comfortably with aperture and shutte priority, apart from a few exceptions).

However, there are a few situations where the autofocus fails most of the time:

  • if the subject contrast is too low
  • in the dark
  • with fences, bars or grasses in front of the main subject

In these cases, of course, manual focusing is required. Unfortunately, this is not very easy with the classic SLR camera, because the focusing aids (microprism ring, split image indicator) are missing from today’s focusing screens. However, mirrorless cameras and the display of SLR cameras offer focusing aids such as focus peaking, in which subjects that lie in the plane of focus are surrounded by a luminous outline. This helps a lot with manual focusing.

By the way, did I mention that you can definitely combine manual focus with the automatic exposure modes?

As always, please feel free to leave a comment.