I was brought up on fully manual cameras — no automated exposure of focus or anything else. It wasn’t until I got a Minolta SLR as a teenager than I even had a camera with manual focus aids. Today I still strongly prefer to use focus manually when shooting from the tripod in my landscape and similar photography, and I almost never use AF (or fully automated exposure) for that kind of work.
It istn’because I think manual focus is “fun” or anything like that, but because for that kind of work it is better for the way I photograph. (I’ll spare the explanation here.)
But for things like street and travel and event photography, I virtually always use autofocus. Unless you are going with the old-school hyperfocal focus approach (or its relative, the “focus at 10 feet and us f/8” street photography approach) autofocus is faster and more accurate than what we can get by trying to manually focus on moving subjects while holding the camera.
And… these Fujifilm AF lenses will still let you manually focus when/if you need to… but the MF-only lenses are not so flexible — they can’t AF when the situation calls for it.
So, I get it: for reasons that seem inexplicable to me, some folks seem to get some “pleasure” out of manually focusing in situations where AF would work as well or better. But, speaking for myself, I don’t understand how that is more “pleasurable” (and I’ve done it, for years) or how it leads to better photographs when working handheld.
YMMV.
Jan 07, 2026 at 11:20 AM
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