Manual focus is just better. It is. Period.
At least for me. See here why.
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I am also a big fan of manual focus. I have a Fuji X-T20 that came with the 18-55mm kit lens. I probably use it about 1% of the time. The other 99% is vintage glass, primarily Konica Hexanon lens. I am probably most in line with your 3rd reason. I feel much more a part of the process Ă nd enjoy it so much more.
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I like manual focus for the same reason I like manual exposure…control. Manual focus also works well with wildlife shots when the camera often gives priority to the branches in front of the animal than the animal itself. I have a canon R7 and it has been designed to have nice manual focusing options including peaking and a focus guide link to the selected focus point.
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I’m also a long time vintage glass shooter and I tend to agree about what you said too ! I learnt to develop technics to cope with the inability to fast focus on the unexpected (see the trajectory of the subject and pre focus on an object of it’s path for example) but it still require constant practice to master and sometime it’s still is a miss ^^
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And I learned that that’s OK. On the one hand there is that quote from HC Bresson that said that “sharpness is a bourgeois concept”, and on the other hand, afaic sharpness and focus is only fourth in line as importance for a good picture, after story, light and composition.
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Huhu, ok, let’s not put all the focus of sharpness then 
even though my failed wannabe perfectionist inner self still likes to pixel peep when you’re obviously right sharpness far from fundamentals is just a nice to have in a picture, a technical point.
I can see where manual focus lenses could be good for street photography since they can be pre-focused/zone-focused in anticipation. Then all you need is the “seeing”. A person wouldn’t need to worry about the technologies. Just hit the shutter release and call it “good” the moment all the elements to make in a great photo align.
HCB was so good at predicting focus and pointing the camera that, if I remember correctly, he never used the viewfinder when he made a few portrait images of Susan Sontag. Familiarity with his tools allowed for that.
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To be fair, for HC Bresson, exposure was also a bourgeois concept as far as he cared, given that he was famous for giving his darkroom and printing assistant horrible exposures that they had to fight hard to save or turn into something useful
While I agree that he was really good, and sometimes a bit of softness is desirable even, one has to wonder how those quotes came to be and if they are just an excuse for being lazy.
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While at face value you make a what seems like a fair point, I would not use HC Bresson and lazy in the same sentence…
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It was only as a figure of speech And in his context/work, what he said is perfectly valid
I came from a background of using film. When hand enlarging I used a magnifying device to focus on the grain that made up the film. This is the ultimate form of pixel peaking and it really only has the purpose of making sure your equipment is correctly focused. What is more important is the feel of sharpness and focus when viewing the image as a whole at the correct distance since we don’t normally look at an image with a magnifying glass. My answer to this in the digital world is to use a 43 inch monitor and sharpen my image viewing the full image to judge the effect. This works well in DT, but I know in LR I used to have to pixel peak at 100% magnification to judge the sharpening effects and this was an unsatisfactory experience for me (I am unsure if this is still the case as LR6 is the latest version I have).
I personally avoid pixel peaking and since I probably never print as large as my 43 inch screen the sharpness and noise both seem better when I actually do print at 6x4 inch or A4. BTW, one of my favourite landscape images in the Playraw category I loved because of a softness about the image. My edit increased the sharpness and lost the beauty of the image. This instance changed my obsession with technical sharpness. Take a look at Fall color on the bayou
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I find the topic of intentional use of softness in pictures interesting and I think there’s many use of it, the example you give is a good one I think as leaves, branches and trees in high density in an image when sharpen can be rather distracting and are personally giving me a “micro contrast” sensory overload, and unpleasant overwhelming feeling. There are many other use as composition trick to change the mood, atmosphere, almost conceal something …
Opposed to that we rarely do question the use of sharpness as it’s thought as an indisputable quality ?
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Since he came from a very wealthy and highly bourgeois family background I would file that quote under sarcasm.
In the referenced image, I wasn’t specifically trying to be soft but there was so much “theoretical” detail in the trees that could’ve been artificially over sharpened, so I tried to hold back a bit and look at the resultant image with human eyes, not computer pixels.
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I personally feel that many of us pixel peak and seek ultimate sharpness and technical perfection as an end gaol in itself. In doing this we do an injustice to the art of photography which is about so much more than scientific technical perfection. There are so many posts here in the forum where people are seeking the ultimate sharpness and I agree that “leaves, branches and trees in high density in an image when sharpen can be rather distracting and are personally giving me a “micro contrast” sensory overload, and unpleasant overwhelming feeling.”
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HCB was also French communist, which tended to reject bourgeois family histories. Which is why the quote likely resonates as truth in France where it seems sarcastic from other perspectives.
Not to hijack the thread, but thinking a bit further about “sharpness”, perhaps you’re already aware of the history of the Linked Ring, the Photo Secessionists, and the Pictorialist Movement. Reading the show catalogue (it’s a massive book actually) from a recent Clarence White exhibition in the US is very interesting reading. Add to this the PhD thesis that Dr. Russell Young wrote and we can begin to sense a larger, often missed, potential for imaging that goes beyond that “bourgeois concept.”
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I use manual focus 95% of the time, and zone focusing for 85% of that. I’ve tried every which way known to man regarding autofocus and (for numerous reasons) it never works out. I use manual (zone) focus because…
- it’s much quicker
- it extends battery life
Of course, when it comes to autofocus, others may have different experiences — keep in mind that I don’t have a super-fast camera, and battery life isn’t great at the best of times.
Also, it’s worth mentioning, that there’s just something about manual focus that I simply enjoy; 
even if I was able to use auto focus effectively, I’d still likely use manual — quite simply, it’s just a preference.
Almost forgot: I shoot street photography, so everything I’ve said here is in context to that genre only. It’s also worth mentioning that I shoot a lot with vintage lenses (that are manual focus only anyway) , so it’s something I’m both used to doing and often have no control over.
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It’s practically exactly my experience. With the exception that I shoot wide-open 95% of the time for reasons I will not get into here and now.
I should have probably mentioned that this only applies to stills.
In video I do use, prefer and appreciate a very good AF.
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MF and street was the only thing I could afford when I first picked up a camera.
Well, a little landscape if it accidently came my way.
Those were the 90ies.
AF was really hard and very hit and miss both an analog and digital until a colleague looked in disgust at me, took my DSLR, set the AF to C and the useless AE-L button on the back to activate and deactivate (!!!) the AF.
Took me a week to get accustomed to and I have never looked backed.
Any proper camera is used that way since.
My thumb controls the focus, the index finger takes care of the shutter.
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Please do go into it at some point, though — I’d be very interest to hear about it.
I’ve tried shooting wide open when the light gets low, but always chickened out otherwise and fallen back to my zone-focus safe zone. As everyone knows, shooting at 1/500 second at f8 has it’s limitations (and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated by a shot because the background’s a distraction).
Have you done a video about shooting street wide open? Apologies if you have and I’ve missed it. If not, I for one would certainly look forward to you doing one.
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