Second, start learning to manual focus. I can hear you saying to yourself that you already know how to manually focus. I'm not talking simple manual focusing; the kind of thing you might do when you're shooting a flower or something. I'm talking speeding up your wrist so you can track a bird way out there. The point here is to compose your shot as the bird approaches. He's not in range yet but you've got your sights on him. I suggest designing the composition as he gets closer. I know there's a lot going on here--composing and focusing--but I don't think it's too much. Mentally what you're doing is getting keyed into the image as a whole instead of just placing the sensor on the target. It's an important difference in my book if you want to do something other than shooting images smack in the middle of your frame. Enough of the mumble jumble. Just practice manually focusing as long as possible while simultaneously setting up a nice composition. There's relief by the way. I'm not suggesting you completely depend on you manual focus skills to make images. Just prior to shooting the image, press the AF function to lock in the focus and then fire the shutter. It's simple. Okay, it's not that simple.

There's one thing hou have to worry about; the focus sensor. We haven't picked one and if you use the wrong one it'll totally destroy your image. That's the rub, the technology isn't up to speed to help you select the perfect one every time. You have to make compromises and my manual focus technique is designed to give you time to choose your compromises. There's two things you can do. Either you pick a specific focus sensor and place it on the subject or you use all the sensors and let the camera pick the closest one. Either can work and I use both depending on the occasion. Here's what I've found