Over a decade ago, I wrote an article about turning off autofocus and instead being more intentional about shooting images by manually focusing your lens. This isn’t the same as telling a camera where to focus the lens, instead, you’re the one doing the focus and therefore then changing so much more about the scene when you focus the lens. It will make you change composition, exposure, etc. When combined with settings the shutter, aperture, ISO, and white balance manually, you become far more in tune with everything that the picture will be. Over a decade ago, I used to shoot without autofocusing and only relying on the manual focus wheel on my old Olympus E-510. And even back then, it was making me think more about my shots, framing, and forcing me to concentrate more on achieving the perfect photo that I have set in my mind already instead of the one that the camera thought I wanted.
